Two screens of film about - and sometimes shot by - Claes Oldenburg, detailing his inspiration, his methods and his relationship with his partner Hannah Wilke.
Social & External
Unknown Role
What is true and what is false in the hideous stories spread about the controversial figure of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (12-41), nicknamed Caligula? Professor Mary Beard explains what is accurate and what is mythical in the historical accounts that portray him as an unbalanced despot. Was he a sadistic tyrant, as Roman historians have told, or perhaps the truth about him was manipulated because of political interests?
Filmed in 1974 and edited and released in 1983 (and then rereleased by its director in 2005), DEAD PEOPLE purports to document the final years of Frank Butler, a local fixture in the depressed burg of Ellicot City with a particular fondness for drink and tales of the dead. Over hazy 16mm footage two decades later, Deutsch adopted a painfully unsentimental view of his early approach, colored as it was by notions of ethnographic film and an undercurrent of fetishism for a man he considered somehow more "alive" than himself. While it chafes against notions of authenticity in documentary and incisively hints at the complicity of the subject in inventing his own history, DEAD PEOPLE simultaneously oozes nostalgia, transcending its own judgment as a gauzy memorial for the man Deutsch once called a friend.
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.
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
Short documentary film on the fashionable nightclubs and the trendy pop culture scenes that were famous in London on the late 70's. Released as a support feature to the first Alien (1979) movie.
Short documentary of David Lynch building a lamp.
Though Henry Kissinger is often giving short statements to the media, he refuses detailed interviews about his own life. Now he has agreed to answer questions about his person in an extensive documentary.
Dalibor K. is an industrial painter, amateur horror maker, the composer of angry songs, painter and a radical neo-Nazi. He is approaching 40, but he is still living with his mother Vera, Aged 63, and is yet to experience the real relationship with a woman. He hates his job, gypsies, Jews, refugees, homosexuals, Merkel, spiders and dentists. He hates his life, but he doesn’t know how to change it.
A documentary following the adventures of three high school robotics teams battling for first place at a national robotics competition in Miami, Florida. Lone wolf Will builds robots so powerful they're unstoppable...if only they don't destroy themselves first. The Mechanical Misfits are an all-girls team stumbling through their first foray into combat robotics, and Elizabeth and Danielle are a formidable pair looking to reign supreme during their senior year.
A documentary that takes an in depth look at a government sanctioned art school in Cuba and its students. Interviews of various artists attending the school allow viewers a glimpse into their personal and professional lives.
Alastair Sooke champions pop art as one of the most important art forms of the twentieth century, peeling back pop's frothy, ironic surface to reveal an art style full of subversive wit and radical ideas. In charting its story, Alastair brings a fresh eye to the work of pop art superstars Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and tracks down pop's pioneers, from American artists like James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha to British godfathers Peter Blake and Allen Jones. Alastair also explores how pop's fascination with celebrity, advertising and the mass media was part of a global art movement, and he travels to China to discover how a new generation of artists are reinventing pop art's satirical, political edge for the 21st century.
"Adrift" is shot on the arctic island of Spitzbergen and in Norway. It combines time-lapse photography with stop-motion animation of the landscape. Through camera-angles and framing the film gradually dislocates the viewer from a stable base where one loses the sense of scale and grounding.
Eighteen years in the making, two-headed cow started off as a black and white film that followed Dexter Romweber and his drummer Crow on a rock and roll tour along the same route as General Sherman. The film was not finished due to many circumstances, but the filmmakers were able to resume the film seventeen years later. After major TV appearances, a stint on a major label, bouts of depression and drug addiction, the film took on a different tone and poignancy.
Footage filmed in Spain, subjected a new visual effects process. Deslaw devoted himself to the discovery of a new machine that enabled film to be developed while using a new method called solarisation.
In decades past, Native American artists who wanted to sell to mainstream collectors had little choice but to create predictable, Hollywood-style western scenes. Then came a generation of painters and sculptors led by Allan Houser (or Haozous), a Chiricahua Apache artist with no interest in stereotyped imagery and a belief that his own rich heritage was compatible with modernist ideas and techniques. Narrated by actor Val Kilmer and originally commissioned as part of an exhibit of Houser’s work at the Oklahoma History Center, this program depicts the artist’s tribal ancestry, his rise to regional and national acclaim, and the continuing success of his sons as they expand upon and depart from their father’s achievements. Key works are documented, as is Houser’s tenure at the Santa Fe–based Institute of American Indian Arts.
Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.
This documentary offers a behind-the-scenes look at Björk and her touring entourage for the 2001 Vespertine tour. It includes interviews with harpist Zeena Parkins, the Inuit choir from Greenland, electronic duo Matmos, and an ongoing conversation with Björk herself about her recordings and her tours. The documentary is interspersed with live footage of songs from the tour shot by Ragnheidur Gestsdóttir, which themselves correspond to the performances chosen for the Vespertine Live album.
'After Haiyan' is a short film about the challenges faced by the Deaf community in Tacloban, Philippines accessing disaster relief, medical care, and basic services after Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda.
