Social & External
The people behind it
Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.
In his contribution to the On Art and Artists interview series, Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) begins by discussing his childhood love of the John Ford film Stagecoach and its influence upon his decision to make films while attending Antioch College. Describing the affinity he developed for work operating at the intersection of film materiality and personal language, Dorsky explains how he developed his philosophy of the “devotional film” and the “microcosmic viewer.” Dorsky likens his practice to Buddhist sculpture, referring to himself as a “Japanese poet continuing aspects of the ethos of the Marxist revolution.” In the interview, the artist describes his use of the screen as an “altarpiece for the image” and emphasizes his use of editing to create works which “harmoniously coalesce.” Interview conducted by Jeffrey Skoller in May 2000, edited in 2014.
Stan Brakhage is a film maker whose work is shown mainly at film festivals. His work has been likened to poetry. Brakhage explains his techniques and his motivation.
After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.
Human hands can be both destructive and healing, Jeffrie Po suggests in his experimental film with spiritual outreach. He portrays a human being as a faun who roams the jungle dauntlessly, yet is destructive. The forest with vanishing cattle becomes a battlefield between dark powers and the power of salvation.
'Afloat' is an experimental film that paints a portrait of Japanese performance artist: Ayumi Lanoire. The film opens as a telephone call between Ayumi and Person X, which meanders the audience through the various layers that make up her personas leading one to wonder whether she is in fact a myth or reality.
A camera rotates around the same four towers. Seasons, weather conditions and the positions of the camera change over the course of the film. The sound goes round in circles and drifts in variations.
HSP 100 is a portrait of experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain. As Le Cain discusses his life, work and relationship with cinema, Rashidi envelops him in a hallucinatory audio-visual ambiance that ultimately results in a poetic dialogue with the ideas and feelings he expresses.
A road trip in the truest sense: shifts, irritations, motion at the levels of image and sound, in all directions. Like a distillate of a “best-of” road movie, Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovačič condense cinema to pure trip – moving past colorful image surfaces that fluctuate between abstraction and depiction.
When Billy Roisz’s images and dieb13’s sound (remix: gnu) are brought together in this way, oberflach.avi becomes a unique experience.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?
An experience of a camera swinging in different gestures facing the optical distortion of the Sun. The last appearance of the smudge.
a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)
An immigrant's last attempt to restore childhood innocence on strange lands.
If the fly eats the flower, does the fly become the flower?
Machines can only function with a human who operates. It is an inseparable relationship where the two often overlap—machines malfunction, humans malfunction. Machines are machines; humans can be machines.
The life and times of artist Richard Ellis
This video takes a particular viewpoint, with the camera placed behind a zone of blur. Slowly, we experience the perception of an expanded time. An expectation is created and resolved in the observation of the passage of boats that dissolve into the nebulousness, disappearing from our sight like a mirage.
Amber Heard and Nicole Kidman discuss their characters Mera and Atlanna.
A string of threatening emails escalates into a revenge plot involving a newly married US marshal and his ex-girlfriend.
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED combines acting legend Alec Baldwin with director James Toback as they lead us on a troublesome and often hilarious journey of raising financing for their next feature film. Moving from director to financier to star actor, the two players provide us with a unique look behind the curtain at the world's biggest and most glamourous film festival, shining a light on the bitter-sweet relationship filmmakers have with Cannes and the film business. Featuring insights from directors Martin Scorsese, 'Bernando Bertolucci' and Roman Polanski; actors Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain and a host of film distribution luminaries.
A feature length documentary about the all-women team at the helm of Pixar's original feature, Turning Red. With unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to Director Domee Shi and her core leadership crew, this story shines a light on the powerful professional and personal journeys that brought this incredibly comical, utterly relatable, and deeply heartfelt story to the screen.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.
A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.
Featuring interviews with filmmakers and industry legends, discover the origins and evolution of The Joker, and learn why The Clown Prince of Crime is universally hailed as the greatest comic-book supervillain of all time.
An inside look at one of the most anticipated movie sequels ever with James Cameron and cast.
Retrospective documentary about the making of the horror cult classic "The Return of the Living Dead."
A documentary about the making of David Fincher's 2008 film THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Virtually every element in the evolution of the Fincher's film is documented here, from the project's attachment to numerous other directors during the 1990s, to its shoot in 2006 and 2007 in New Orleans, to its complex, CGI-intensive postproduction process.
Daniel Craig candidly reflects on his 15 year adventure as James Bond. Including never-before-seen archival footage from Casino Royale to the upcoming 25th film No Time To Die, Craig shares his personal memories in conversation with 007 producers, Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.
A deep dive into the making of the Paranormal Activity films with first time ever interviews with cast and crew, never-before-seen footage from the movies, and a preview of the seventh installment in the franchise.
A documentary on legendary movie-poster artist Drew Struzan.
Join director Clint Eastwood and his creative team, along with Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller, as they overcome enormous creative and logistic obstacles to make a film that brings the truth of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle's story to the screen.
A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.
Ranjit, a farmer in India, takes on the fight of his life when he demands justice for his 13-year-old daughter, the victim of a brutal gang rape. His decision to support his daughter is virtually unheard of, and his journey unprecedented.
A night of drunken chaos rocks a quiet Dutch town in this shocking documentary about a teen's birthday invite that accidentally went viral on Facebook.
A documentary about how a dominant cultural and demographic institution both sustains their traditional activities and adapts to the digital revolution.
