Skyworks: "Light, Lighten, Lightning" (Three Mile Drop)

The first film made by Markopoulos after moving to Europe, Bliss was shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra.

2012: Time For Change is a documentary feature that presents ways to transform our unsustainable society into a regenerative planetary culture. This can be achieved through a personal and global change of consciousness and the systemic implementation of ecological design.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

A girl reads during a bus ride

Filmed in 2003 while staying in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, the work centers on a small Greek statue revealed in shifting morning and afternoon light. Beavers weaves these images with views of the East River and Manhattan Bridge, later completing the film in 2010 as a meditative elegy for his friend Jacques Dehornois.

Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.

In PATH OF CESSATION the image that is communicated to us by Fulton is a highly mystifying one. Rather than analyze, or enter into a dialogue with the Tibetan culture that he photographs, Fulton has succumbed to it, and through the process has presented us a work of great surface, as well as formal, beauty.

For us, a thought always presupposes a society, a culture and above all the consciousness of time. We are haunted by immortality, human notion par excellence. As if the world was here to fascinate us. And to disappoint us. The film travels around the bulb like the Earth around the Sun. Light makes the film visible. A fragile film, like our existence. In the orbit of the film tragedy and our reality, the image resists the cruelty of the experiment.

A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy and of breaking free from abusive cycles: made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment.

A group of leftist activists expose the exploitation of immigrant workers by a criminal network with connections to local government officials. The movie was produced by the group SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, also the Russian word for elephant). SLON was a film collective whose objectives were to make films and to encourage industrial workers to create film collectives of their own. Its members included Valerie Mayoux, Jean-Claude Lerner, Alain Adair and John Tooker, and Chris Marker.

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles.

In the feature documentary, Summer 82 – When Zappa Came to Sicily, filmmaker and Zappa fan Salvo Cuccia tells the behind-the-scenes story of Frank Zappa's star-crossed concert in Palermo, Sicily, the wrap-up to a European tour that ended in public disturbances and police intervention. Cuccia had a ticket to the concert but never made it. Thirty years later, collaborating with Zappa's family, he re-creates the events through a combination of rare concert and backstage footage; photographs; anecdotes from family, band members, and concertgoers; and insights from Zappa biographer and friend Massimo Bassoli. The story is also a personal one, as Cuccia interweaves the story of Zappa's trip to Sicily with his own memories from that summer.

Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern german countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.

Everyday Portabella

Man Ray, the master of experimental and fashion photography was also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, a philosopher, and a leader of American modernism. Known for documenting the cultural elite living in France, Man Ray spent much of his time fighting the formal constraints of the visual arts. Ray’s life and art were always provocative, engaging, and challenging.

In this film, Will Young travels to Magritte's native Belgium to find out more about the man whose trademark was a bowler hat and whose apparently conventional exterior concealed the mind of a subversive rebel. Will uncovers a childhood marked by tragedy, a marriage that lasted from Magritte's adolescence until his death in 1967, and a stunning artistic legacy which endures to this day.

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

Rummaging for Pasts is an experimental juxtaposition of two cinematic documents: the video diary of an international archaeological excavation and a collection of assorted eight millimeter found footage of Indian weddings.

The constant movement of the wheels, threads, sprockets, feet and hands suggests restlessness, and this is paralleled by the soundtrack. The unknown woman could be Gretchen from Faust, hopelessly in love or Ariadne who gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of labyrinth or perhaps she is one of the fates, weaving destiny… Enlarged from Super-8 to 35mm, the film is very grainy, in itself an homage to the medium of film which is also emphasized by the depiction of all kinds of turning machines, both in image and sound.

In 1952, Haanstra made Panta Rhei , another view of Holland through the eyes of a painter and filmmaker. Its poetic images of water, skies and clouds reflect Haanstra's own moods.