The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.
On the Various Nature of Things
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
Edeltraut Hertel - a midwife caught between two worlds. She has been working as a midwife in a small village near Chemnitz for almost 20 years, supporting expectant mothers before, during and after the birth of their offspring. However, working as a midwife brings with it social problems such as a decline in birth rates and migration from the provinces. Competition for babies between birthing centers has become fierce, particularly in financial terms. Obstetrics in Tanzania, Africa, Edeltraud's second place of work, is completely different. Here, the midwife not only delivers babies, she also trains successors, carries out educational and development work and struggles with the country's cultural and social problems.
"My last image of Jonas."—Ken Jacobs
Completely topless. Completely uninhibited. The craze that began in San Francisco is now exploding across the USA and Europe.
Rather than writing a simple letter to explain his absence from the press conference for his latest Cannes entry, "Goodbye to Language," at the Cannes Film Festival, instead, legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard created a video "Letter in motion to (Cannes president) Gilles Jacob and (artistic director) Thierry Fremaux." The video intercuts from Godard speaking cryptically about his "path" to key scenes from Godard classics such as "Alphaville" and "King Lear" with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald, and quotes poet Jacques Prevert and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Legendary underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez and his friends -- cartoonists Robert Crumb and Jay Kinney and cultural critic Susie Bright -- discuss Spain's art and his life as an outlaw biker, '60s figure and social satirist.
The Bridge is a controversial documentary that shows people jumping to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco - the world's most popular suicide destination. Interviews with the victims' loved ones describe their lives and mental health.
6-18-67 is a short quasi-documentary film by George Lucas regarding the making of the Columbia film “Mackenna's Gold”. This non-story, non-character visual tone poem is made up of nature imagery, time-lapse photography, and the subtle sounds of the Arizona desert.
Drawing on VHS tapes of a programme hosted by her mother on Bulgaria’s national television, the filmmaker gives a pop-style and in-depth chronicle of the gentle – even “over-gentle” – 1989 revolution.
On April 18th, 1906, San Francisco witnessed its most devastating natural disaster – an earthquake that initiated a city-wide fire. The commanding officer of the U.S. Army base at the Presidio, Fred Funston, gathered citizens to fight the fire, patrol the streets, and rebuild the city – all without authorization.
Made on a wind-up Bolex camera, The Sound of Seeing announced the arrival of 21-year-old filmmaker Tony Williams. Based around a painter and a composer wandering the city (and beyond), the film meshes music and imagery to show the duo taking inspiration from their surroundings.
1994 at the Ambassador Hotel, 55 Mason Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California. From 1978 to 1996, the hotel was managed by Hank Wilson, a San Francisco LGBT activist who made the hotel a model for harm reduction housing. 134 run-down and exhausted rooms populated by homeless men and women, sometimes even children. All of them in urgent need of care, compassion and humanity. Nobly provided by voluntarily working professional health care and social workers staff, various benefactors, volunteers, neighbors, and community contributions.
Lucien Bull was a pioneer in chronophotography. Chronophotography is defined as "a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion."
WORM AND WEB LOVE begins with bracketed light, a throbbing worm in the sand and sea foam mixed with grass and oceanic detritus, soon superimposed upon the dark blue-toned face of a man, then a woman (Michael McClure and Amy Evans McClure), each seen, then on, through superimpositions of drifting smoke and the back-lit stark grid of a spider's web. The obvious affections of the man and woman, their clear display of love, is metaphored in these tenuous superimpositions, culminating in the frantic movements of the spider itself and the dance of joy of the features of the couple in loving resolution.
This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing-together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music - not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to "sing" the city as remembered from daily living...complementary, then, to an earlier film, "Unconscious London Strata." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.
Pun on "light" intended - that short preceding expulsion of breath perhaps the "subject matter" of this film which centers in consideration of death. It is the third tone poem film and did much surprise me by thus completing a trilogy of the "4 classical Elements." (SB)
After a six -or seven- year study of Hammurabi's Code, original Babylonian Text and translation, I've tried to feel my way into the moving visual thought process of this ancient culture (whose numerical system is composed primarily of building materials, nails, joints and the like): this, then, is a visual music which balances the two thought processes of Structure and Nature.
Out of the vagueries of sometime beseeming repetitive light patterns, and the delicately variable rhythms of thought process, the imagination of The Monumental and of the Ephemeral are born to mind hard as nails.