circles

A hearse cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells his story in this city marked by conflicts, violence and paradoxes. He remembers his childhood and the discovery of his sexuality.

Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; there is also a motor cycle and film equipment. In succeeding scenes he appears to try on identities offered by institutional doctrines of religion and social traditions of (overt) masculinity. Much of the film was constructed in-camera with a small amount of editing afterwards. An innovation was the use of in-camera fade-outs as phrase markers, not as terminal points, within a single set-up or shot.

Based on Plato's dialogue Charmides.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

An abstract experimental short film from Jordan Belson.

First film by Julio Bressane shot in exile, "Memoirs" is a film about a man who repeatedly kills the same type of woman in same places, the same way. Filmed on the streets of London.

After the sunset, a man wonders between the edges of the highways gathering edible roadkill animals.

Pourvu qu'ils me laissent le temps

A recollection of almost 40 years of career. A giant image-jukebox, from early 70s autoportrait to films for Alain Bashung / Elli Medeiros, private karaokes to “video sculptures” applied to John Travolta or Maria Callas, and much much more…

Lucy Harmon, an American teenager is arriving in the lush Tuscan countryside to be sculpted by a family friend who lives in a beautiful villa. Lucy visited there four years earlier and exchanged a kiss with an Italian boy with whom she hopes to become reacquainted.

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

SEELE orders an all-out attack on NERV, aiming to destroy the Evas before Gendo can advance his own plans for the Human Instrumentality Project. Shinji is pushed to the limits of his sanity as he is forced to decide the fate of humanity.

Le crash

An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities.

FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a search for structures in an apparently chaotic world. The medium of film fulfils the need for orientation. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

For this film, Takashi Makino allowed himself to be inspired by the earth. In a never-ending stream of images, we recognize elements from the forest that he then reduces to an abstraction. The film came about as a classical composition in which the picture and the musical contribution of Jim O’Rourke link up seamlessly and lead the mood in turn. A sense of freedom is what predominates.

CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...

A journey into the BBC archives unearthing glorious performances and candid interviews from some of Britain's greatest poets.