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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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?
Jérôme Bel's show features the memories of spectators at the Avignon Festival.
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.
The young Friedrich Schiller begins his life as a poet with a dramatic escape. After the sensational success of his first drama "The Robbers", he deserts from the Duke's army. At the Mannheim Court and National Theatre, he initially receives a friendly reception, but his new play "Fiesko" is not well received by the artistic director Dalberg. In the successful actor and author August Wilhelm Iffland, Schiller finds a strong competitor for the position of in-house playwright and vies with him for the love of the same woman. The young poet's situation becomes increasingly precarious; he has no money, suffers from hunger and falls seriously ill. Nevertheless, he works feverishly for recognition and success with no regard for his own health.
The story of a close-knit group of young kids in Nazi Germany who listen to banned swing music from the US. Soon dancing and fun leads to more difficult choices as the Nazis begin tightening the grip on Germany. Each member of the group is forced to face some tough choices about right, wrong, and survival.
Ruža left Serbia, her country, over 30 years ago and lives in Zurich. Her daily life is a string of repetitive moments until, one day, Ana arrives on the scene and upsets Ruža's painstakingly organized world. A subtle friendship develops between the two strong willed women.
For generations, two rival French villages, Longueverne and Velrans, have been at war. But this is no ordinary conflict, for the on-going hostilities are between two armies of young schoolboys. When he is beaten by his father for having lost his buttons, the leader of the Longueverne army, Lebrac, has an idea which will give his side the advantage: next time, he and his brave soldiers will go in battle without their clothes...
This film is a glimpse into the life, love and the unconquerable spirit of the legendary Bruce Lee. From a childhood of rigorous martial arts training, Lee realizes his dream of opening his own kung-fu school in America. Before long, he is discovered by a Hollywood producer and begins a meteoric rise to fame and an all too short reign as one the most charismatic action heroes in cinema history.
John Berlin, a big-city cop from LA moves to a small-town police force and immediately finds himself investigating a murder. Using theories rejected by his colleagues, Berlin meets a young blind woman named Helena, whom he is attracted to. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose—and only John knows it.
A DEA agent provides former Marine Tim Kearney with a way out of his prison sentence: impersonate Bobby Z, a recently deceased drug dealer, in a hostage switch with a crime lord. When the negotiations go awry, Kearney flees, with Z's son in tow.