A video letter to Nancy Holt, made in homage to a shared interest in terminal lakes, framed views, monuments and time. Filmed on and around the Great Salt Lake, Mono Lake and Meteor Crater.
Handbook of Movie Theaters’ History is a documentary about the history, the development in the present days and the future of movie theaters in the city of Turin, Italy. It mixes the documentary language with comedy and fiction, and is enriched by interviews to some of the most important voices of Turin cinematography. The film follows the evolution of movie theaters by enlightening its main milestones: the pre-cinema experiences in the late 19th Century, the colossals and the movie cathedrals of the silent era, the arthouse theaters, the National Museum of Cinema, the Torino Film Festival, the movie theaters system today and the main hypothesis about its future.
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
A chronological look at the creative life of Luchino Visconti (1906-1976). It examines his theatricality, role in the neorealist movement, use of melodrama, and relation to decadence. It touches on the impact of a fabulously wealthy childhood, his writing for "Cinema," his politics, his work with Renoir, his appreciation of Thomas Mann, and his deep knowledge of literature and the arts. Visconti moves constantly between film and the theater, staging plays provocatively, working with Maria Callas at La Scala, and shooting films in theaters. Clips from his films and interviews with actors, crew members, and critics provide details for this portrait of creativity.
Adlon recounts the making of the sculpture, "Kugelkaryatide" the sphere that stood in the center of Tobin Plaza between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film follows the sculpture from its creation as the largest bronze sculpture of recent times to the aftermath, where it now stands, heavily scarred, in Battery Park.
A short documentary about the Making Of Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943).
Get the scoop on the legendary actor-director-New Yorker John Cassavetes straight from the mouth of his friend, peer and co-star Peter Falk (Columbo) in Paul Joyce’s documentary, Out of the Shadows: The Films of John Cassavetes. Falk lays bare the quirks and gifts of the director of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under the Influence, and star of De Palma’s The Fury and Tarantino favourite Mikey and Nicky, in this outright and honest interview.
The first definitive feature documentary to lend new and compelling perspectives on the partnership, both professional and personal, of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and their primary associates, writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins. Footage from more than fifty interviews, clips, and archival material gives voice to the family of actors and technicians who helped define Merchant Ivory’s Academy Award-winning work of consummate quality and intelligence. With six Oscar winners among the notable artists participating, these close and often long-term collaborators intimately detail the transformational cinematic creativity and personal and professional drama of the wandering company that left an indelible impact on film culture.
Florida, 1994. Artist Mike Diana is convicted on an obscenity charge in the wake of an undercover police officer purchasing his limited edition zine Boiled Angel. Here is the very unusual story of what led to this First Amendment debacle happening for the first time in the United States.
Takeda is a film about the universality of the human being seen thru the eyes of a Japanese painter that has adopted the Mexican culture.
Follows the behind-the-scenes work of Studio Ghibli, focusing on the notable figures Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki.
Memories from the making of the classic Milos Forman film "Ragtime".
Narrated by Uncle Jack Charles and seen through the eyes of Indigenous prisoners at Victoria’s Fulham Correctional Centre, this documentary explores how art and culture can empower Australia's First Nations people to transcend their unjust cycles of imprisonment.
Dinosaurs Vs. Apes: DINOSAUR MOVIES and HOLLYWOOD GOES APE! have been hailed as the definitive documentaries on the prehistoric and anthropoid creatures that have appeared on the silver screen. Filled with rare movie clips, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews.
"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."
The story of the secret of self-creativity, the loneliness of the soul, the meridians of con-sciousness and the scope of man. Ilmārs Blumbergs (1943-2016) is a concept in life than can be classically proven if we analyze his work in set design, poster art, painting and multimedia work. The personality of Blumbergs, however is a shifting and intangible material which ensures superior value, wonderfulness and intimacy to all that he created. Those who analyze his art and world perceptions, recognize the work as seeming to come from antiquity, but it can never be catalogued or recorded in bookkeeping. How fortunate that it also cannot be consumed.
Marc Chagall was an artist caught between two worlds, between traditional art and modernism, figuration and abstraction. The film accompanies him on an important stage of his life from 1910 to 1930, between Paris and Vitebsk. Chagall's home town was a laboratory for the artistic avant-garde in Belarus, while Paris was the center of modern art movements.
Stuart Cooper's short about the work of Spanish artist Juan Genovés is an inspired introduction to the works of this extraordinary artist, exploring its minimalist aesthetic and storytelling qualities through a variety of cinematic techniques, including rostrum, animation, news footage and live action recreations.