Algerian director Hamid Benamra turns his focus to Mustapha Boutadjine, a charming, mercurial collage artist in Paris whose very work methods embody resistance, and celebrate those who work to liberate others. Boutadjine creates his portraits of Third World artists such as Miriam Makeba, and Algerian figures such as Assia Djebar from pieces of paper torn from high end fashion magazines and other, glossy, glitzy publications. Using this material is as much an act of rejecting bourgeois standards, which are often anti-North African in France, as much as elevating these figures and making them the social and visual standard against which we should judge ourselves, not the runway models of Chanel.
Dash Snow rejected a life of privilege to make his own way as an artist on the streets of downtown New York City in the late 1990s. Developing from a notorious graffiti tagger into an international art star, he documented his drug- and alcohol-fueled nights with the surrogate family he formed with friends and fellow artists Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen before his death by heroin overdose in 2009. Drawing from Snow’s unforgettable body of work and involving archival footage, Cheryl Dunn’s exceptional portrait captures his all-too-brief life of reckless excess and creativity.
A collage of various excerpts from German TV channels, all recorded on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 and arranged by Holger Kreymeier and shown without commentary in an attempt to cover the absurdities of a typical broadcasting day, inspired by Walter Kempowski's book "Bloomsday '97".
A haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. The film provokes the viewer to reflect on how our society can deprive boys of wholeness.
Selbstportrait 1
Photos, animation, and music illustrate the story of the Beatles.
Using visual assemblage as a technique to delve into the artist's own formation of personal narrative, self-possession and the aestheticization of compositional materials, Sodipo extends her long term fascination with images that pull, extend, transform and recontextualise notions of femininity, desire, and danger.
A viral video shows a mysterious figure walking along the edge of the woods each day, and filmmaker Bill Howard sets out to spend a night there to find out exactly what it is.
A year in the life of Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier, students of Fine Arts in Paris, lovers in troubled times, overwhelmed by maddening verbal and auditory stimuli, witnesses of a globalized violence more visible than ever in a chaotic digital era, in which the slow execution of simple gestures in a silent performance is an act of resistance.
Could film gelatin, a 16mm film camera, 3 lenses and film developing chemistry experimentation act as messengers between the spirit and the physical world? a one day trip to the remote town of Panguipulli (Chile) seeks to explore possibilities and to also expand on the power of audio frequencies as a healing instrument. A manifestation of the hummingbird movement? A connection between mind, landscape, sound, latent image? A replication of Rukapillan volcano’s intermittent flows of magma through fissures on the earth’s surface? -Colibri- erupts 16mm single frame experiments & bursts smoke and sonic healing vibrations
In 1968, art students Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell made a trippy photo collage for their musician friends Syd, David and Roger. The resulting album and album cover, A Saucerful of Secrets, helped launch two careers: that of Pink Floyd, one of the 70s megabands, and of Hipgnosis, which, over the course of the next 25 years, designed a stream of iconic album covers.
Godard by Godard is an archival self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. It retraces the unique and unheard-of path, made up of sudden detours and dramatic returns, of a filmmaker who never looks back on his past, never makes the same film twice, and tirelessly pursues his research, in a truly inexhaustible diversity of inspiration. Through Godard’s words, his gaze and his work, the film tells the story of a life of cinema; that of a man who will always demand a lot of himself and his art, to the point of merging with it.
Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.
Artists like Robert Smithson, Donald Judd and Peter Hutchinson borrowed liberally from science fiction film and literature in their work. This collage treats the marvellous, seemingly indestructible, objects of mid-century science fiction cinema as artworks in their own right.
Somewhere between Sri Lanka and the island of New Guinea, in the upper reaches of the Amazonia jungle, there is rumoured to be a lost tribe of cannibals. Assembled out of Italo cannibal mondo movies, Hollow Jungle documents their rituals, sourcing their power in narrative repetitions and analogies, before structurally locating them in the prurient pathologies of certain pseudo-ethnographies.
A documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.
Three Nicaraguan-American artists from the Washington D.C. Metro area discuss growing up in two cultures and how it influences their art.
A fragmented look into the memories of two strangers from the same hometown, brought together through a university project.
Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.
A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.