David Hockney: The Art of Seeing

Made shortly before Robert Motherwell’s death in 1991, is an exploration of the Abstract Expressionist movement and a portrait of one of its last survivors. Having come to New York in the early 1940s, Motherwell found himself on the battleground of American art. He and a group of painters set out to change the face of American painting. The film charts this epic battle led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, who endeavored to make American painting equal to painting elsewhere and, in the process, shifted the center of modern art from Paris to New York.

In 1988, art student Damien Hirst and a group of like-minded associates mounted an exhibition in a building in the East End of London. Entitled Freeze, it was a huge critical and commercial success, propelling Hirst and the group into the spotlight of the avant-garde. More than five years later, Hirst exhibits to international acclaim and is regularly derided in the tabloid press. This portrait of Hirst, which resumes the Omnibus season, is presented as a drug-induced nightmare after Hirst has been put to sleep by a sinister dentist, played by Donald Pleasence. In between interviews with fellow Freeze artists including Angus Fairhurst , Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin , Hirst is seen preparing Mother and Child Divided, his work for last year's Venice Blennale. The piece consists of a cow and a calf, each sawn in half, pickled in formaldehyde and exhibited in four tanks.

The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.

Destroying your own artwork. For many artists it is unmentionable, but Loes Heebink from Kolderveen irreparably destroyed her artwork "Fluisteraars" herself and came up with the idea for a documentary of the same name, directed by Saskia Jeulink.

Yves Montand would have been 100-years-old in 2021. A journey through the 20th century by the son of an Italian immigrant who reached the peak of his art and popularity. The song, the cinema, the commitments, a film all in archives.

Seeing is to painting what listening is to politics. Survival as an artist demands both. Paint Until Dawn is a documentary on art in the life of James Gahagan (1927-1999), who painted all night to push the limits of vision. His life and thought reveal a correlation between art and activism through an interesting angle: the creative process itself.

This film features some of the most important living Postmodern practitioners, Charles Jencks, Robert A M Stern and Sir Terry Farrell among them, and asks them how and why Postmodernism came about, and what it means to be Postmodern. This film was originally made for the V&A exhibition 'Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 - 1990'.

Documentary about filmmakers of the New German Cinema who were members of the legendary Filmverlag für Autoren (Film Publishing House for Authors). Among them are Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders.

Celebrating Billy Connolly's 75th birthday and 50 years in the business, three Scottish artists - John Byrne, Jack Vettriano and Rachel MacLean - each create a new portrait of the Big Yin. As he sits with each artist, Billy talks about his remarkable life and career which has taken him from musician and pioneering stand-up to Hollywood star and national treasure.

In 1968 Roger Smith ate a peach during a break from work. When he was finished he took out a pocketknife and began carving the peach pit into a tiny pig. 43 years later the retired meter reader and cattle rancher from Culloeka, Tennessee, has carved hundreds of peach seeds into hummingbirds, stingrays, gospel choirs, entire villages, even a baseball stadium with more than 100 figures. "Given enough time," says Smith, "I don't think there is anything you can't make out of a peach seed."

Buenos Aires is a complex, chaotic city. It has European style and a Latin American heart. It has oscillated between dictatorship and democracy for over a century, and its citizens have faced brutal oppression and economic disaster. Throughout all this, successive generations of activists and artists have taken to the streets of this city to express themselves through art. This has given the walls a powerful and symbolic role: they have become the city’s voice. This tradition of expression in public space, of art and activism interweaving, has made the streets of Buenos Aires into a riot of colour and communication, giving the world a lesson in how to make resistance beautiful.

Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, better known as Pippa Bacca, was a 34 years old Italian artist. She crossed 11 countries involved in wars, hitchhiking with another Milanese artist, Silvia Moro, both wearing a wedding dress. This was a performance for peace, trust and hoping to prove that if you rely on others, you’ll receive good things only. After travelling many roads, the two artists decided to split for a while in Istanbul, planning to meet again in Byblos. Pippa left then, alone, and nobody heard from her again.

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

A personal, accessible look at an artist - Kevin Barnes, frontman of the endlessly versatile indie pop band of Montreal - whose pursuit to make transcendent music at all costs drives him to value art over human relationships. As he struggles with all of those around him, family and bandmates alike, he's forced to reconsider the future of the band, begging the question - is this really worth it?

Mistr Theodorik

A portrait of Nam June Paik produced as a 'video catalog' for the exhibition 'The Electronic Super Highway', which premiered at The Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with recent installations, historical background and interviews.

A documentary by Olivier Gonard, shot partly in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, that examines Olivier Assayas' film Summer Hours, and its approach to art.

94-year old Esther, a pensioner with bad sight, is in search of her artist daugther’s public decoration. Endless phone conversations takes her through municipal bureaucracy and lost culture secretaries. Will she ever get an answer to the eternal question: Where does the art really go?

This MGM Passing Parade series short takes a look at changing definitions of art in the United States.

A documentary about surrealist artist Salvador Dali, narrated by Orson Welles.