“Manual of Evasion LX94” is a thought-provoking Dadaist film about time by the Portuguese director Edgar Pêra. It was shot in Lisbon in 1994 and stars Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker. Time is explored from many unusual angles, while Pêra fills the screen with a wide variety of bizarre and mind-warping imagery.
An accurate depiction of the basic tenets of northern Mahayana Buddhism, cast into living or "experiential" form, consistent with powerful mantras heard on the soundtrack of the film. Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Lama, was the advisor.
In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social criticism. For nearly 27 years he was a monk of the austere Trappist order, where he became an eloquent spiritual writer and mystic as well as an anti-war advocate and witness to peace. Merton: A Film Biography provides the first comprehensive look at this remarkable 20th century religious philosopher who wrote, in addition to his immensely popular autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, over 60 books on some of the most pressing social issues of our time, some of which are excerpted here. Merton offers an engaging profile of a man whose presence in the world touched millions of people and whose words and thoughts continue to have a profound impact and relevance today.
A documentary on sufism
Do you know Lacan, which many consider as the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud? Beyond the myth, the legends and sometimes, the curses, this film by Gérard Miller allows us to discover his work and his personality, through the testimony of his patients, his students, and also his relatives. Born with the XXth century into an upper-middle-class Catholic family, a psychiatrist by training, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of culture, a friend of Picasso, Levi-Strauss and Sartre, Lacan was a great theoretician, an outstanding practitioner, and he remains the most modern, the most challenging and even the most sulphurous of psychoanalysts. The director Gerard Miller met Lacan thanks to his brother, Jacques-Alain, the most faithful of his students, who married his daughter Judith. Their close and intense relationship makes this film exceptional.
Crownsville Hospital: From Lunacy to Legacy is a feature-length documentary film highlighting the history of the Crownsville State Mental Hospital in Crownsville, MD.
A hilarious introduction, using as examples some of the best films ever made, to some of Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek's most exciting ideas on personal subjectivity, fantasy and reality, desire and sexuality.
A series of interviews are conducted concerning people's beliefs towards the possibility of an afterlife. The interviews are filmed against a set of strange backdrops, and are intercut with clips from classic films and a variety of stock footage.
A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
An unconventional biography by Oscar nominee Paola di Florio and Sundance winner Lisa Leeman about Hindu mystic Paramahansa Yogananda who brought yoga and meditation to the West in 1920 and authored the spiritual classic "Autobiography of a Yogi," which became the go-to book for seekers from George Harrison to Steve Jobs.
This compelling film represents a rare record of an original genius. In Jung on Film, the pioneering psychologist tells us about his collaboration with Sigmund Freud, about the insights he gained from listening to his patients' dreams, and about the fascinating turns his own life has taken. Dr. Richard I. Evans, a Presidential Medal of Freedom nominee, interviews Jung, giving us a unique understanding of Jung's many complex theories, while depicting Jung as a sensitive and highly personable human being.
The Stanford prison experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life, and the effects of imposed social roles on behaviour. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University.
In the early nineties, Dr. Jacobo Grinberg’s career was blooming and he gained lots of international credit as a researcher in the fields of telepathy and neurophysiology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. When Dr. Grinberg mysteriously disappears in 1994, the police find no trace of him. The only thing that is clear, is that all his research material, including his computers, disappeared along with him.
In "psychanalyse", a two part documentary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan answers to questions submitted by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller under the direction of Benoit Jacquot. The Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF, the french public TV) broadcast this program. This documentary and its text became famous because this is the only televisual experience practiced by Lacan. A fair amount is made of the fact that Lacan was renowned for his powers of seduction and what effect this had on transference in the clinical setting. According to some of the interviewees, he could be irresistibly seductive, so much so that some thought him "monster".
Carl Gustav Jung interviewed on the subject of 'Sigmund Freud': how Jung met him, how he was influenced by him and where he disagreed with him. Jung talks about word association, Freudian slips, the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the ego, archetypes, falling in love and more.
A portrait of Baba Vanga, born Vangeliya Pandeva Dimitrova, a blind Bulgarian prophet, mystic, clairvoyant, and herbalist. Millions of people believed she possessed paranormal abilities.The first part of the documentary portrait of the prophet Baba Vanga not only as a mysterious supernatural figure, but as a living and immediate person. The second part follows the discussion between prominent Bulgarian scientists and intellectuals who, with few exceptions, completely reject Vanga's abilities and advise the film to be reworked with a view to a materialistic understanding of man. The two parts contrast Vanga, the crowds of visitors to her home and the stiffened way of thinking of the representatives of science in Bulgaria in those years. Forbidden to the general public after its first screening.
A documentary about the legendary Japanese filmmaker.
For a series of programs made for TV Fnac, Philippe Grandrieux meets different people who tell us, each in their own point of view, a story of images. After Paul Virilio (The World is an image) and before Jean-Louis Schaeffet, Le Trou noir (AKA The Black Hole) gives us the enlightened reflections of psychanalyst Juan David Nasio about real and reality.
Alan Watts talks about our perception of the world, and how we derive metaphysics from it. Watts recorded this video in 1971 as a pilot for a public television series in the United States.
This documentary examines how Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime made use of ancient mysticism, occultism, and mind-control techniques in their efforts to win the war.