This Academy Award-nominated film takes a moving personal story, illuminates it with insight and humor, and makes it universal. In recounting her attempts to come to terms with her mother's advancing Alzheimer's disease, Deborah Hoffmann explores the relationship between mother and daughter, parent and child, and the tenacity of love.
Claude Lelouch presents in his own vision of Iran. Between tradition and modernity, the movie reveals all the country's vision contrasts, under the very precise and aesthetic eye of Lelouch : veil and miniskirt, caviar and oil, ancestral Islamic art and the Shah of Iran.
A short documentary showing how Arnold Schwarzenegger's military service played a critical role in his fame.
A look at the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans, who meet once a year for 4 days at The Gathering of the Juggalos.
A skeptical glance cast upon the Christian, pagan and scientific opinions on the supernatural. One has to decide which is right and which is wrong, if any. A film dedicated to the bad taste and naivety everywhere.
Film historians examines the making of the 1938 "The Adventures of Robin Hood."
A documentary charting the rise and fall (and inevitable undead rise) of fictional killer Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th series, which takes in the "video nasty" phenomenon in general.
A couple of dolts lost in the woods get stalked by a lunatic obsessed with John Stamos.
A captivating documentary following a young polar bear venturing on his first solo journey across the Canadian Arctic during the summer thaw. As the ice disappears, he must adapt to a challenging landscape without the one thing polar bears depend on most: sea ice. With stunning cinematography and heartfelt narration, this film offers a rare glimpse into the resilience and struggle of polar bears facing a rapidly changing climate.
In this short film, prominent jazz musicians of the 1940s gather for a rare filming of a jam session. This highly stylized chronicle features tenor sax legend Lester Young.
The striking landscapes of rural Sardinia provide the backdrop to this lyrical look at the hardscrabble lives of the region’s shepherds in winter.
An important early film by Stan Brakhage, which Joseph Cornell commissioned as a record of New York's Third Avenue elevated train before it was torn down. Curiously lacking in people, the film focuses on the rhythms of the ride and reflections in train windows, finding a real-world version of the superimpositions Brakhage would later create in the lab. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.
Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment.
Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a "Nô" performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows today.
Claude Ventura's documentary Chambre 12, Hotel de Suede, was made for the French television channel Arte in 1993. Ventura checks into room twelve in the hotel's final week of operation: it is demolished the day after he checks out. Room twelve was one of the principal locations for Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave masterpiece Breathless, and Ventura's documentary investigates the production of Godard's film.
A film shot during the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California around the meetings organised by the Black Panthers Party to free Huey Newton, one of their leaders, and to turn his trial into a political debate. They tried and succeeded in catching America’s attention.
George Lucas's senior project at the University of Southern California in 1966. It was named for the lap time of the Lotus 23 race car that was the subject of the film. It is a nonstory visual tone poem depicting the imagery of a car going at full speed, and featuring the car's engine as the primary sound element. Shot on 16mm color film with a 14 man student crew, it was filmed at Willow Springs Raceway, north of Los Angeles, CA. The Lotus 23 was driven by Pete Brock.
After a look at some strange creatures, the narrator and camera take us to the Chaco forest, on the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, where a vampire bat lives, desmodus rotondus, attacking wildlife and domesticated creatures, killing small ones by draining all their blood and killing large ones by leaving a parasite in their bloodstream. Four inches long, with a 12-inch wingspread, we see it walk, approach a victim, pull out a patch of fur large enough for it to engage its teeth, then lap six or seven ounces of blood. Its saliva may be an anesthetic keeping its victims from waking. A stub nose and harelip contribute to its efficiency and its hideous look.
This is a montage of different images from the JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy triumphs and assassinations, all three events being observed by Lyndon Johnson as the dark figure who is plotting the anti-black rights movement.
Title cards introduce images we watch without narration; they are displays of shape and color. François de Roubaix's electronic music accompanies these images, photographed under a polarizing microscope. The crystals appear to move like tiny organisms: small four-part fans share the frame with flowing lines of pink. Multiple patterns appear side by side.