In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.
In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.
Bear (10 minutes, 35 seconds) was Steve McQueen's first major film. Although not an overtly political work, for many viewers it raises sensitive issues about race, homoeroticism and violence. It depicts two naked men – one of whom is the artist – tussling and teasing one another in an encounter which shifts between tenderness and aggression. The film is silent but a series of stares, glances and winks between the protagonists creates an optical language of flirtation and threat.
A dark take on media manipulation and political situation in Malaysia. The idea is to convey how normal citizens even though sometimes they know what they read and heard are absurd and not right but still with not much options to react but to accept them in order to maintain their livelihood. And at the same time powerful figures whom understands the mentality of the citizens continues to drives their ridiculous and absurd ideas and opinions to the mass.
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
Seeking fulfillment, a young drifter forgoes isolation to embark on a year-long murder spree.
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
This highly stylized, critically acclaimed film from the 70's mixes silent film cards, a soundscape, color, opera music and atmosphere to explore the Freudian truths about men's fear of women that Wedekind powerfully exposed. A kinetic melodrama of the rise of a femme-fatale and her fate at the hands of Jack-the-Ripper. Rethinking Pabst's silent film and Alban Berg's opera.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
A psychiatrist tells two stories: one of a trans woman, the other of a pseudohermaphrodite.
Italian immigrant kidnaps a wealthy British woman, and they fall in love.
An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.
A short film by John G. Avildsen.
Hermitage, defined by Bene as "a rehearsal for lenses", beyond any literal rendition - its narrative trace comes from one of his anti-novels, Credito Italiano V.E.R.D.I - displays his immediate attitude to thinking a cinematic language completely based on actor's movements and actions, and more specifically, on his presence and his schemes. Camouflaged or naked, still or moving, his body seems to play and be played at the same time, shifted by objective and subjective tensions, both metaphorically and visually speaking.
A Hollywood actor grows tired of making the same corporate movies, so he moves to Argentina to find more experimental and meaningful work.
A personal, subjective journey into the mind of Greta Thunberg, before realizing her calling as a climate activist. While struggling with mental health issues and bullying because of her Aspergers, she also grapples with the sense of impending doom due to the climate crisis. These same struggles and fears drive her to make change and become the person she is today.