Mike Disfarmer, small town portrait photographer turned posthumous art star. This is the story of an eccentric curmudgeon and artistic icon whose powerful pictures of depression-era USA have left an unlikely mark on the modern Manhattan art world.
In the 1970s the North American Soccer League marked the first attempt to introduce soccer to American sports fans. While most teams had only limited success at best, one managed to break through to genuine mainstream popularity - the New York Cosmos. The brainchild of Steve Ross (Major executive at Warner Communications) and the Ertegun brothers (Founders of Atlantic Records), the Cosmos got off to a rocky start in 1971, but things changed in 1975 when the world's most celebrated soccer star, the Brazilian champion Pele, signed with the Cosmos for a five-million-dollar payday. With the arrival of Pele, the Cosmos became a hit and the players became the toast of the town, earning their own private table at Studio 54. A number of other international soccer stars were soon lured to the Cosmos, including Franz Beckenbauer, Rodney Marsh, and Carlos Alberto, but with the turn of the decade, the team began losing favor with fans and folded in 1985.
The Legend of the Paraguay War Legend tells that during the Paraguay War (1864-1870), families that lived near the border and soldiers who were leaving for battle used to hide their valuable belongings by burying them in secret spots, in order to safely recover them after the war. In several cases, though, the only people who knew about the secret spots of those personal treasures died before they could go back to recover them. According to inhabitants of that region, the spirits of those tormented men would reveal the location of those "buried and hidden" treasures to chosen people in their dreams, visions or by haunting them. "The Legend of the Paraguay War" approaches local legends in a historic and literary way. Those legends were born from within the biggest conflict in South America, and were developed and influenced by the local imaginary view of the world and which can be considered a relevant part of those people's identity up to this day
Drama in the Desert: The Sights and Sounds of Burning Man is a full-color book (which includes a DVD) based on the captivating images of Holly Kreuter, with contributions from an additional 90 Burning Man participants, offering the reader a taste of the Burning Man experience. The DVD includes an original Score by Sean Abreu, seven slideshows featuring 560 Kreuter photographs and video interviews with 8 artists including Larry Harvey.
Glasnevin Cemetery is the final resting place of 1.5 million souls; it is Ireland's national necropolis. ONE MILLION DUBLINERS reveals the often unspoken stories of ritual, loss, redemption, emotion, history - and the business of death.
Dragan Wende has lived in Berlin since the '70s and has seen the city change through the years. His nephew comes to live with him as Dragan remembers the better days he lived as a Yugoslavian immigrant in a divided city.
This documentary visits cities and towns and captures stunning landscapes along Europe's majestic Danube at Christmastime. Locations covered include Passau, Germany; Salzburg, Oberndorf, the Wachau Valley, and Vienna in Austria; Bratislava, Slovakia; and Budapest, Hungary. Along the way the viewer learns relevant history.
People looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre – or are they just looking at themselves?
The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.
In this hour-long documentary, Oxford academic Janina Ramirez tours the country in search of Anglo-Saxon art treasures. Her basic thesis - and it is a plausible one - is that we should not look upon their era as a "dark age" as compared, for example, to Roman times, but rather celebrate it as an age in which creativity flowered, especially in terms of artistic design as well as symbolism. She shows plenty of good examples, ranging from the Franks Casket to the Staffordshire Hoard, and the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The Great Northwest is a documentary film based on the re-creation of a 3,200 mile road-trip made in 1958 by four Seattle women who thoroughly documented their journey in an elaborate scrapbook. Fifty years later, Portland artist Matt McCormick found that scrapbook in a thrift store, and in 2010 set out on the road, following their route as precisely as possible and searching out every stop in which the ladies had documented. Patiently shot with an observational, cinema-vérité approach, The Great Northwest is a lyrical time- capsule that explores how the landscape, architecture, and culture of the Pacific Northwest has changed over the past fifty years.
The Channel Tunnel linking Britain with France is one of the seven wonders of the modern world but what did it take to build the longest undersea tunnel ever constructed? We hear from the men and women, who built this engineering marvel. Massive tunnel boring machines gnawed their way through rock and chalk, digging not one tunnel but three; two rail tunnels and a service tunnel. This was a project that would be privately financed; not a penny of public money would be spent on the tunnel. Business would have to put up all the money and take all the risks. This was also a project that was blighted by flood, fire, tragic loss of life and financial bust ups. Today, it stands as an engineering triumph and a testament to what can be achieved when two nations, Britain and France put aside their historic differences and work together.
Kyra Gardner's loving tribute to growing up in the world of the psycho killer doll, Chucky.
A documentary about Academy Award-winning costume designer Cecil Beaton. A respected photographer, artist, and set designer, Beaton was best known for designing on award-winning films such as 'Gigi' (1958) and 'My Fair Lady' (1964). The film features archive footage and interviews with a number of models, artists, and filmmakers who worked closely with Beaton during his illustrious career.
July 1969. America made history and sent the first humans to the moon. High-quality NASA footage and extensive news broadcasts bring this sensational moment in history bursting back into life. Live news footage from every corner of the globe recreates the excitement and elation that surrounded the event, as 600 million people tuned in to watch Neil Armstrong's remarkable first steps.
This World War II documentary rests on an unusual thesis: it argues that, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the actions precipitated by the U.S.A.F. that truly helped turn the tide were perpetrated not by the widely-ballyhooed U.S.N. aviators or aircraft carriers, but by the American submarines - silent warriors beneath the deceptively placid ocean surface. The subs, after all, were responsible for gravely wounding Japan's industry, all but destroying the Japanese merchant fleet, and therefore preventing reinforcement of Japanese military garrisons. In relaying this story, the program draws on a series of interviews with military veterans, and endless archival footage of naval battles that chronologically tells the gripping story of the Pacific Front of the war.
Sixty-years after setting sail on the PT 658, a group of World War II veterans reminisce about their extraordinary experiences on the boat while attempting to restore it to it's original condition in a documentary that has a little something for war buffs and amateur historians alike.
As Australian cinema broke through to international audiences in the 1970s through respected art house films like Peter Weir's "Picnic At Hanging Rock," a new underground of low-budget exploitation filmmakers were turning out considerably less highbrow fare. Documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley explores this unbridled era of sex and violence, complete with clips from some of the scene's most outrageous flicks and interviews with the renegade filmmakers themselves.
Unlike what people may think, Krakatoa was not the biggest volcanic eruption in history. More than two hundred years ago, on April 10th 1815, Mount Tambora in Eastern Indonesia became a merciless killer. It unleashed the most deadly volcanic eruption in human memory, wiping out at least 117,000 people. And an entire civilization and its language disappeared. But the killing didn’t stop there. It has now been proven that this eruption could have triggered an extraordinary and little known cataclysmic event: worldwide climate change.
Did Leonardo da Vinci come up with all of his ideas and inventions by himself or did he also borrow some of them from ancient scientists including those who lived 1,700 years before him.