The film explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.
After his father’s lambs are brutally slaughtered, an intellectual son returns to his widowed father’s remote shack, confronting haunting signs of violence his father fears is returning.
"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."
As Cirque du Soleil reboots its flagship production, O, more than a year after an abrupt shutdown, performers and crew members face uncertainty as they work to return to their world-class standards in time for the (re)opening night in Las Vegas. With unfettered access, filmmaker Dawn Porter captures the dramatic journey of the world's most famous circus act on its way back from the brink.
‘Objects of War’ is a series of testimonials on the Lebanese war. Each person chooses an object, ordinary or unusual, which serves as a starting point for his / her story. These testimonials while helping to create a collective memory, also show the impossibility of telling a single History of this war. Only fragments of this History are recounted here, held as truth by those expressing them. In ‘Objects of War’, the aim is not to reveal a truth but rather to gather and confront many diverse versions and discourses on the subject. ‘Objects of War’ started in 1999 assembling the testimonials of eleven persons. It was first shown in 2000 . It continued in 2003 with ‘Objects of War n°2’, recording seven additional testimonials. This time however, and since then, the recorded material is left unedited, shown in its integrity. The work of collecting and assembling these stories continued with ‘Objects of War n°3 & n°4’ in 2006 and ‘n°5 & 6’ in 2014.
Filmed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Cut Piece documents one of Yoko Ono’s most powerful conceptual pieces. Performed by the artist herself, Ono sits motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing in a denouement of the reciprocity between victim and assailant.
A visual epic about subliminal longings and the aesthetics of suffering. A work of atmospheric images and sounds dedicated to the retina, the eardrum and the soul. The young Inuit - the sea seems to have washed him up one day, to some place forgotten by God and time. Time, which is commonly called life, sticks to his fingers. Three steps behind him leaps the parasite of eternal suffering. The story begins in this enraptured sphere, focusing on a series of episodes in which the young man's fate takes its course: in a strange world that knows its own laws.
McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The video culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.
In the first 58 minute Performance, Relation in Space, which took place in July 1976 at the Biennale in Venice, Abramovic/Ulay, both naked, walk towards each other from opposite ends of a room, touching as they pass each other, and then they repeat the movement while their bodies collide and one of them (Marina) falls over under the impact, until they are both exhausted. A statically mounted video camera simultaneously filmed the touching of the bodies in the middle of the room.
Live performance film produced to celebrate the release of The Subliminal Rabbit Presents!
The duo made up of musician and actress Julia de Castro and double bass player Miguel Rodrigáñez thus premieres their latest show, Exhalación: vida y muerte de De La Puríssima. With it, they intend to put an end to the ten-year revolution of EL CUPLÉ this scenic musical genre, which the singular tandem has merged with jazz, cumbia and electronics on stages around the world. Show nominated for the Premios Valle Inclán. As the duo explains, De La Puríssima was born in 2009 “as a transit project, in which music was the most direct and ritualistic medium from which to raise core issues such as sex, bullfighting, folklore or religion”. Now, a decade later, it is time to remove the peineta and celebrate the end of a stage in which the provocative lyrics by Julia de Castro have traveled through numerous audiences to bring up to date a genre that was in the forgetfulness of national folklore, the cuplé.
County Magistrate, County Magistrate depicts a collective migration unfolding in an indeterminate time and place. Men, women, and children from a village move through mountains as the sky gradually grows dark, walking resolutely into the distance until they arrive at a new settlement. The abandoned courtyards they leave behind still bear traces of daily life: a steaming kettle, unfinished bowls of food, an old television flickering with static, and worn-out pieces of furniture. The camera then slowly pans to an outdoor movie screen showing After Armistice, a black-and-white film released in 1962. In the film, a man draws a business card from his pocket and introduces himself as Xianghe’s newly appointed county magistrate. At this moment, the story slips into another layer of fictional time and space.
At the Summer Palace follows a mysterious man and a young boy as they wander through the Summer Palace, clad in clothing recalling styles from the 1980s and 1990s. The work unfolds like a hazy moment between dreaming and wakefulness, recalling the stillness of a languid afternoon. The era-specific details present in the setting seem to anachronistically clash with their pair’s clothing and behavior. Through this dislocation of time and space, Yang Fudong evokes the complex emotions of childhood, specifically the mixture of curiosity and unease a child feels upon encountering the strange and unknown.
The rehearsal of a future play. Through the movement of the body, the protagonists form a structure full of tension and try to evoke past stories.
Young Man, Young Man unfolds in a fragmented structure, reconstructing Yang Fudong’s recollections of his 1980s adolescence in a Beijing military compound, along with scattered memories of collective life in the post-socialist era. In the film, young boys run, practice martial arts, wait for the bus, splash in water, and play in cornfields. There is no fixed narrative; instead, the boys seem to drift through an endless summer. Yet an undercurrent of distance and estrangement suggests that childhood has already quietly slipped away. These moments of adolescent innocence and loneliness, crystalized within the film, form a dreamlike allegory.
In 2003, Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh became the first World Champion of Chessboxing. This brain-busting combination of alternating rounds of chess and boxing was in fact an art performance calling for more balance in a world of extremes, and the audience reaction was so electric that it inspired Rubingh to push it as a real sport. Rubingh’s methodical ability to achieve balance in the ring is put to the test outside of it when impulsive British TV Producer Tim Woolgar takes up the sport and his opposing vision for success creates a rift between them, endangering chessboxing’s future.
Matei, a young shepherd boy living in the outskirts of Romania, finds more comfort among his sheep than with his abusive, alcoholic dad. But now Matei is starting to mimic his father's violence, he's faced with a question: 'Who am I?'
A sonic, surrealist narration in which the musicians fingers’ are the protagonists. Reflecting on common hierarchies and roles of the fingers when navigating through physical, digital and sonic realms, "Pinkie" is taking a perspective of deconstructing and reassigning them towards a queer, holistic reception of playing an instrument.
My Trip to Miami follows a well-meaning, misguided, tourist as he tries to self-actualize via Trip Advisors algorithmic script. My Trip to Miami is a documentation of a fantasy, a failure in image-based expectations.
A dynamic, contemporary dance performance about how it is impossible to explain your deepest wishes or desires... how these can only be expressed in dreams and sleep. In the final sequence, we see the importance of effort and hope in the dancers' attempt to escape gravity. The all-male company performs to the music of David Byrne.