In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness.
Roda Viva Roda Brasil
Katherine Watson is a recent UCLA graduate hired to teach art history at the prestigious all-female Wellesley College, in 1953. Determined to confront the outdated mores of society and the institution that embraces them, Katherine inspires her traditional students, including Betty and Joan, to challenge the lives they are expected to lead.
This experimental nature documentary by Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts depicts climate change and the wave of extinction from the point of view of our near future. Actually, it depicts the age we live in now, or rather its fateful consequences.
The Kuwaiti short film العاصفة (The Storm) explores Kuwait's social and economic shifts before and after the discovery of oil. Through the perspectives of an older father and his modernized son, it delves into the challenges of tradition versus rapid modernization.
A phone sex operator loses her grip on reality, caught in a hypnotic relationship with a caller making disturbing confessions.
This fantastical movie inspired by the music of Michael Jackson features imaginative interpretations of hit tracks from the iconic 1987 album “Bad”.
Two screens of film about - and sometimes shot by - Claes Oldenburg, detailing his inspiration, his methods and his relationship with his partner Hannah Wilke.
Anne Bean, John McKeon, Stuart Brisley, Rita Donagh, Jamie Reid and Jimmy Boyle are interviewed about their artistic practice and the legacy of Surrealism on their work.
Yo creo que...
Multi-award-winning comic Jayde Adams’ debut stand-up special Serious Black Jumper sees the Bristolian take a completely new direction. Having packed away the sequins and glamour (for now), Jayde has gotten rid of the show stopping musical numbers and glitzy costumes to reinvent herself as a ‘Successful Independent Woman Person’, exploring what it means to be a feminist this century. Working class woman of the people and “Britain’s Funniest Woman comic” (Daily Mail) invites you to discover what it takes to be a real role model, whilst wearing the feminist wardrobe staple attire; the Serious Black Jumper™.
Here I am. A mind backed up by delusion of previous condition. Free or humiliated? Who is ashamed? Me or you? It is so hard to share one's secret.
A film and a 3-screen installation about a woman who manages to maintain her integrity by avoiding the paradigms imposed by the social conditions of existence, focusing instead on the world beyond material dimension with its many limitations. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in an unattainable have become the main basis of the film in which the prosaic reality is not expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of a town in decay.
Exploring the duality between friendship and loneliness, this intimate narrative short tells the story of David, a bright young boy struggling with a broken home life, as he tries to reconnect with his childhood best friends as they search for something to do in their small suburban town.
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
The title comes from Sergei Yesenin's last poem before comiting suicide. Using Virginia Woolf's last letters as a base, this film is meditation on the power of the word and its undertsanding and the the last moments before saying "goodbye".
Notes on Film 01 Else
In 1962 New York City, love blossoms between a playboy journalist and a feminist advice author.
Kristina, a self-named Hungarian female lion tamer, arrives in New York to become a dance choreographer. Kristina, now a middle-class NYC artist concerned about the environment, has a sailor lover named Raoul. The film, a collage work, an essay film, a fictional narrative and a documentary all rolled into one, is one of the most important independent American feminists films made during the 1970's.
In his study a cardinal is surrounded by bizarre props in an atmosphere of decay.