A title card announces that the film is a result of found footage assembled by cameraman J.J. Burden working for the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jim Dunn, who has disappeared. Leach, a heroin addict, introduces the audience to his apartment where other heroin addicts, a mix of current and former jazz musicians, are waiting for Cowboy, their drug connection, to appear. Things go out of control as the men grow increasingly nervous and the cameraman keeps recording.
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
A harrowing, gorgeous, in-your-face-and-mind 45-minute black-and-white film by Marty Topp, produced by Ira Cohen for Universal Mutant. “Marty Topp’s beautiful film of ‘Paradise Now’ reveals how the theories of revolutionary change and the experience of sexual liberation are not separate paths to the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Practiced together they are a single thrust, encompassing both political action and sensual joy, leading to the dreamed-of terrestrial paradise.
A professional recording of the official play. The play has a play-within-a-play format, with characters Jim Dunn as the "producer" and Jaybird as the "writer" attempting to stage a production about the underbelly of society using "real" addicts. Some of the addicts are jazz musicians. They all (except for the "producer", "writer", and two "photographers") have one thing in common: they are waiting for their drug dealer, their "connection". The dialogue of the characters is interspersed with jazz music.
Jonas Mekas’s film captures The Living Theatre’s stage production of The Brig, an unflinching portrait of life inside a U.S. Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. Over the course of a single day, prisoners endure relentless drills, abuse, and dehumanization, exposing the brutality of military discipline with stark immediacy.
a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)
At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressionist colouring 'injected' by electronic means, this emerges as a hypnotic transmutation of a theatrical event into poetic cinema, capturing the ambiance and frenzy of the original. No documentary record could have done it justice.
Jérôme Bel's show features the memories of spectators at the Avignon Festival.
Commissioned work by Julian Beck and members of The Living Theatre (featuring Beck and Judith Malina, co-founders of The Living Theatre, in performance) for broadcast on KQED-TV, San Francisco. The Dilexi Series represents a pioneering effort to present works created by artists specifically for broadcast.
The body of a Real Housewife is an apparatus, an assembly of parts—hair, lips, dress, falsies, mic pack, cell phone, wine stem, camera, restaurant, brand, identity. This body is maintained and degraded, intoxicated and cleansed, in seasons and cycles, systems of supply and denial. The self needs a medium. Who cares who you are when you’re alone anymore?
A man and a woman rule the streets with their somewhat extraordinary skills. One is a hustler and the other is a thief. One day they are yanked out from their happy world of petty crimes.
Euthanizer tells the story of a mechanic who euthanises sick and old pets as a side job. Despite the grim work, he has a soft spot for the animals. Trouble stirs when the owner of a dog he was supposed to end realises that the canine is still alive. The only innocent party in the drama that ensues is the dog itself.
The young Tony will travel from Budapest to the countryside to marry his cousin Katinka, the oldest of the seven sisters Gyurkovics. Because Tony is already secretly married to another, the situation is problematic. Mizzi is the impish middle sister of seven who is glad to leave boarding school and has many adventures making her way back home. This includes impersonating a countess and meeting Count Horkay who is impersonating her cousin Tony, his friend whom Mizzi's mother intends to marry her oldest sister. The younger set all have their own ideas of who they love despite the plans of the older folks.
Bashful lawyer Henry cannot attend his fiancée's birthday party because of a business engagement. However, farcical circumstances find him mistaken for the dance partner of a professional lady hired to entertain a country house party at which his fiancée is a guest.
As the director and the cameraman of a documentary project, Meng and Jianxian are travelling around Taiwan filming statues of religious and historical figures. Their conversations and debates on the statues often touch the political reality of Taiwan. Meng's girlfriend, Ning, is involved in a mediocre commercial feature film (initially as location scout and subsequently as an actress). Instead of realizing her ambition, she finds herself being exploited by the filmmakers. On the other hand, Meng and Ning's relationship is gradually faded.