With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure. — Charles Ruas
A 2004 documentary on thirty years of alternative rock 'n roll in NYC.Documenting the history from the genuine authenticity of No Wave to the current generation of would be icons and true innovators seeing to represent New York City in the 21st century
In this ostensible murder mystery, the genre elements are merely a pretext for the series of haunting (if inconclusive and only mildly erotic) homo-social encounters he stages. Starting with the familiar premise of the absent woman, so popular with Downtown filmmakers, Vogl drains his storytelling of any hints of noir stylization. Instead of nighttime scenes, slick streets, and dark alleys, he shoots documentary-style on the nondescript, sunlit streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and City Island in a manner that casually references the art-film angst of Michelangelo Antonioni.
A film noirish atmosphere is created to show detective Lunch (a popular underground musician and poet) plow her way through the plans of a corporate businessman who seeks government defense contracts through real "corporate wars" and the manipulation of politicians.
Nan Goldin's slide show “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” converted, mixed and screened as a film by the artist, portraying the American underground culture, the no wave scene, post-Stonewall gay subculture, among others.
Weaving blistering performance footage from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. with a sublimely restrained, intimate glimpse into a world-renowned jazz percussionist’s singular voice and complex cosmology.
Vincent Gallo as Flying Christ
Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.
No-Wave film directed by Gordon Stevenson from Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. Mirielle Cervenka (Exene's sister) plays a young woman named Rose who is afflicted with a case of extreme stigmata.
Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and '70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers - brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane - are today acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as America's most innovative art form. FIRE MUSIC showcases the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries, and produced landmark albums like Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Inspiration and Coltrane's Ascension. A rich trove of archival footage conjures the 1960s jazz scene along with incisive reflections by critic Gary Giddins and a number of the movement's key players.
Filmed in Chicago & finished in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is filmmaker, composer and arranger Edward O. Bland's polemical essay on the politics of music and race - a forecast of what he called "the death of jazz." A landmark moment in black film, foreseeing the civil unrest of subsequent decades, it also features the only known footage of visionary pianist Sun Ra from his beloved Chicago period. Featured are ample images of tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and the rest of Ra's Arkestra in Windy City nightclubs, all shot in glorious black & white.
Two aimless psychics develop a strange relationship as they come to terms with having been groomed for espionage as children in the Gifted and Talented Education program.
A melancholic boy. Heavy images. Brightness and colors. Haunting in the form of sound and cuts. A curtain hides something behind it.
Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern's first collaborative effort, The Right Side of My Brain, is a glimpse into the world of unsatiable female lust, narrated by Lydia Lunch. The film was initially dismissed and dismayed by critics such as J. Hoberman, but the criticism of The Right Side of My Brain received only pushed the two to go one step further with Fingered (1986).
PBS produced documentary in two parts: the first is dedicated to saxophonist and composer John Zorn; the second is about Sonic Youth at the height of their powers in 1988.
The Sonny Sharrock Band live in Prague as part of the Knitting Factory Festival Tour of Europe 1990.
At the end of the Reagan years, rocker and confrontational performance artist Lydia Lunch launches a broadside. From a formal podium, she attacks the white male power structure of the US. Next she takes on her parents. Then, the volume lowered and the background the streets of New York, she lets us know what she thinks of life, of herself, and of us, anyone who's watching or listening. Life is depression, despair, and death. She's the girl next door gone bad. And us? Compliant sheep. Lunch lays out a challenge.
A group of actors in the East Village of New York City have been rehearsing for a play when the lead actress in the play turns up dead.
The aftermath of an experience with Heroin causes a man to destroy anything within his path.
A delusional man in a modern day city dresses, acts like, and has the mindset of a cowboy.