The documentary Carving the Divine offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Busshi – practitioners of a 1400 year lineage of woodcarving that’s at the heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.
Yujiro Seki
as Director
as Guion
Nicholas Pike
as Musica
as Fotografia
The late French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle is remembered today for her Nanas, a highly spirited force of colorful female sculptures. These figures, as with all of Niki’s works, possess an unbridled creativity that hums with the very energy of life. Through unpublished stills and recent footage shot in Europe, America, and Japan, this documentary recalls the life and legacy of the multidisciplinary artist, whose portraits and artworks japanese director Michiko Matsumoto photographed from 1981. It introduces in intimate detail such masterworks as the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Italy, a vast collection of large-scale works more than 20 years in the making.
How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often seem happier than the rich? Must a society lose its traditions in order to move into the future? These are some of the questions posed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by filmmaker and explorer Rick Ray. Ray examines some of the fundamental questions of our time by weaving together observations from his own journeys throughout India and the Middle East, and the wisdom of an extraordinary spiritual leader. This is his story, as told and filmed by Rick Ray during a private visit to his monastery in Dharamsala, India over the course of several months. Also included is rare historical footage as well as footage supplied by individuals who at great personal risk, filmed with hidden cameras within Tibet.
The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them. After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, some seventy percent of the contents of the museum was destroyed, stolen, or smuggled overseas to Japan and other countries. The movement to return these items is also touched upon. The footage in this video represents that only film documentation of the Kabul Museum ever made.
Short documentary of David Lynch building a lamp.
A fascinating journey through the life of Israeli artist Dani Karavan, an irreverent and charismatic creator, recognized worldwide for radically transforming public space with his monumental environmental installations.
CRAZY WISDOM explores the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism in America through the story of Chögyam Trungpa, who landed in the U.S. in 1970. Trungpa became renowned for translating ancient Buddhist concepts into language and ideas that Westerners could understand and shattered preconceived notions about how an enlightened teacher should behave. Initially rejected, his teachings are now recognized by western philosophers and spiritual leaders as authentic and profound.
A documentary about surrealist artist Salvador Dali, narrated by Orson Welles.
From the heads of Roman Emperors to the 'blood head' of contemporary British artist Marc Quinn, the greatest figures in world sculpture have continually turned to the head to re-evaluate what it means to be human and to reformulate how closely sculpture can capture it. Witty, eclectic and insightful, this film is a journey through the most enduring subject for world sculpture, one that carves a path through politics and religion, the ancient and the modern. Actor David Thewlis has his head sculpted by three different sculptors, while the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, artist Maggi Hambling and art critic Rachel Johnston discuss art's most enduring preoccupation, ourselves.
North Star: Mark di Suvero is a 1977 documentary film about Mark di Suvero that was produced by François de Menil and Barbara Rose. Born in 1933, di Suvero has become one of the most recognized sculptors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From about 1975 to 1977, fairly early in di Suvero's long career, filmmaker de Menil and art historian Rose produced this film, which was characterized at the time as "a tribute to the extraordinary work and life of the innovative American sculptor of monumental but delicate constructions." The film shows di Suvero making and installing several of his very large sculptures, and incorporates informal interviews of di Suvero, his mother, and others involved in his career and life at that time. From 1971 to 1975 di Suvero, an American, lived in a self-imposed exile in France in protest of US involvement in war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and the filming spans the end of his exile and his return to New York.
A short documentary by Hiroshi Teshigahara about his father, the sculptor Sofu Teshigahara, preparing an exhibition.
56-year-old artist Mindy Alper has suffered severe depression and anxiety for most of her life. For a time she even lost the power of speech, and it was during this period that her drawings became extraordinarily articulate.
The documentary follows Nicolas Vlavianos (1929-2022), a renowned sculptor, in the final years of his life. It captures the moment — when he is around 90 years old — that he returns to an old drawer, tries to pick up his tools, and realizes he no longer has the strength to hold them. That simple gesture becomes the symbolic trigger: the end of his long creative cycle and the beginning of a farewell to his art. From there, the film documents the dismantling of Vlavianos’s studio and workspace, and the gradual process of his withdrawal from physical creation. It’s not just a retrospective of works: it’s a portrait of decline, memory, mortality, and legacy.
In the fall of 1987, Philippe Haas accompanied the sculptor Richard Long to the Algerian Sahara and filmed him tracing with his feet, or constructing with desert stones, simple geometric figures (straight lines, circles, spirals). In counterpoint to the images, Richard Long explains his approach. Since 1967, Richard Long (1945, Bristol), who belongs to the land art movement, has traveled the world on foot and installed, in places often inaccessible to the public, stones, sticks and driftwood found in situ. His ephemeral works are reproduced through photography. He thus made walking an art, and land art an aspiration of modern man for solitude in nature.
KSI and The Paul Brothers, from humble beginnings on YouTube, to mainstream domination. These unrelenting (and controversial) creators show no signs of stopping.
A short, experimental documentary featuring sculptures by Alonso de Berruguete and Juan de Juni. Shot within the Valladolid National Museum, the film is an excercise in what Val de Omar called "Tactile vision".
In the summer of 2018, on the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park, world-renowned artist Christo created his first public work of art in the UK. Inspired by ancient Mesopotamian tombs, the Mastaba is constructed from 7,506 painted oil barrels and weighs six hundred tonnes. It is the latest work in a career spanning half a century and stretching across the world. His work to date have included surrounding 11 islands off the Florida coast with pink polypropylene and wrapping Berlin's Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in Paris. This programme charts the creation of the Mastaba - from the first barrels being put on the water to its final unveiling - and paints a portrait of Christo as he looks back on a life spent making provocative works of art with his wife and partner Jeanne-Claude.
