Disabuse

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it is on the other hand still considered an elitist or hermetic language by audiences intimidated by its lack of recognizable subject matter. Yet ultimately, abstraction continues to be a viable creative path for contemporary artists of all generations, many of whom embrace it as the most inclusive and fundamentally resonant of artistic languages. Filmed at the artists' studios, the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum during their exhibition, "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century."

Events that took place in the capital of the Tajik SSR, the city of Dushanbe in 1929.

On September 11, 1929, the first Termez-Dushanbe train arrived at the newly built station in the Tajik capital. However, not only the train was the first that day - the shots of the arrival of the locomotive, as well as people waiting for it with excitement, became the basis of the first Tajik film.

A Experimental Docu-Drama about the Red Army Faction's formation, and events leading up to their imprisonment and death, from 1970 to 1977.

An abstract perspective into two young South African workers in the heart of Johannesburg's industrial sector during Covid-19

Documentary short film depicting the filmmaking activity at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, featuring dozens of stars captured candidly and at work.

This silent film from 1948 "The Creation of Life" briefly demonstrates how a fetus forms and graphically shows different types of births. It was made by Sherwood Picture Corp., and may have been sold both to schools and professional organizations for medical education, and to the public for shock value. (Several similar birth films were sold in this era through home catalogs and photography shops.) Summary: By means of diagrams, conceptions and pregnancy are explained. Views of various methods of delivery are shown. Created by: T. Marc Sherwood

Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)

Six years after the Berlin Wall fell and five years after German unification this documentary looks into the fast changes in architecture and street life of Berlin Mitte and stays in tune with a piano piece of Ludwig van Beethoven.

A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond…the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA

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An abstract film, with which Pansini attempted "Malevichean" reduction. It is a blank, an empty film reel with coloristic and toned global changes, nothing more.

JoAnn Elam plants collards.

Farm work and nature.

Mudos testigos is a cinematographic collage made from all the surviving material of Colombian silent films, re-editing the images in such a way as to create a single imaginary film: the impossible love story of Efraín and Alicia that traces the convulsive first half of the twentieth century in Colombia. Compiled by the late Luis Ospina and finished posthumously by Jeronimo Atehortúa.

Andy Warhol directs The Factory regular Louisa "Jackie" Foster for a screen test.

Bernadette Corporation describes this work as "A fashion film about the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the color white." Produced for the 2000 Walker Art Center exhibition Let's Entertain, this short film employs a range of strategies to approach the idea of nothingness, emptiness, and vacuity, with an eye to how these notions relate to contemporary mass-cultural entertainment. Juxtaposing "documentary" takes on a fashion shoot with footage of semiologist Sylvère Lotringer giving an impromptu lecture on Mallarmé on a frozen lake, Hell Frozen Over maintains an ambiguous stance from which to both critique and celebrate the power of surface.

Elam turns in place while filming nature.

An outdoor gathering.

Two women gardening on a sunny day.