The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.
A girl who was floating freely in the water accidentally gets her skin cut by a sailboat passing by. The story is derived from personal experience, recreating the senses of women in love and the unique inner sense of time through creation.
Arriving in the US with a background in abstract art, opera, and film—including work with German director Werner Schroeter—Vogl began making Super8 films in New York that stripped away the stylistic markers of Hollywood, New Wave cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, and classic avant-garde film, leaving only traces of their generic conventions. For the first hour of OK Today Tomorrow, he stages a series of fraught encounters around the city between four gentrified New Yorkers before abandoning his vague narrative of youthful angst altogether in favor of documenting the urban landscape itself. The dusk-to-dawn “city symphony” that ends the film resembles similar Super8 social studies by Vogl’s uptown contemporary John Ahearn; both recorded the daily lives of working-class black and immigrant communities on the streets of a city on the verge of the corporate takeover and sweeping gentrification that followed in the 1980s and ’90s. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The second part: Brakhage’s layering of images spends less time with images of war, and begins filtering in scenes of Vienna and his home in Colorado. He sets up a comparison between “Kubelka’s Vienna” and his own.
The quasi-fictional story of transgender sex workers living in Rio de Janeiro's swampy red light district, who are joined by a group of hippies and a runaway stockbroker, "Mangue-Bangue" is the paradigmatic expression of the post-1968 spirit of desbunde, the Brazilian slang catchword for "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll".
A depiction of a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death.
The much sought-after, two-letter web domain suffix of the title is examined as both a form of capital and an emblem of a country on the brink of a climate-induced catastrophe in this simultaneously humorous and illuminating essay film centered on the environmentally contentious Pacific Islands of Tuvalu.
Short experimental 16mm film.
The life of Ukrainian-Soviet avant-garde composer Alexander Mosolov inspires three stories about creation and individualism in the face of state power, set against the Great Purge of the 1930s and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.
Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.
In this story set in near future, a group of young rebels, hippies and 1968 protesters want to cede and make an independent Island from the Mainland. A journalist who came to the Island to make a report about political summit that takes place there gets involved in the clash between young rebels and establishment.
History as immersion and dispersion in the fragments of the past, a visionary journey accompanied by the voice of Patty Pravo. Presented at the Taormina Festival '97.
The wife of an abusive criminal finds solace in the arms of a kind regular guest in her husband's restaurant.
Events take a sinister turn one night in London, when two very different couples arrive at a double-booked apartment. Actions have consequences and not all debts are paid for with money. Leaving, it's harder than you think.
Set halfway through the 17th century, a church play is performed for the benefit of the young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.