First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural artifacts–which could be schematized as East/West, socialism/capitalism, propaganda/entertainment, as well as image/sound–and see how they reverberated. In other words, I wanted to make an essay out of things, as well as a communist musical. But the question arose–what was the ideology of such film play? Is MISSION TO MONGO aestheticized politics or political art? –J. H.
First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural artifacts–which could be schematized as East/West, socialism/capitalism, propaganda/entertainment, as well as image/sound–and see how they reverberated. In other words, I wanted to make an essay out of things, as well as a communist musical. But the question arose–what was the ideology of such film play? Is MISSION TO MONGO aestheticized politics or political art? –J. H.
1977-01-01
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The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.
A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…
Moonwalker is a 1988 American experimental anthology musical film starring Michael Jackson. Rather than featuring one continuous narrative, the film expresses the influence of fandom and innocence through a collection of short films about Jackson, some of which are long-form music videos from Jackson's 1987 album Bad. The film is named after his famous dance, "the moonwalk", which he originally learned as "the backslide" but perfected the dance into something no one had seen before. The movie's introduction is a type of music video for Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" but is not the official video for the song. The film then expresses a montage of Michael's career, which leads into a parody of his Bad video titled "Badder", followed by sections "Speed Demon" and "Leave Me Alone". What follows is the biggest section where Michael plays a hero with magical powers and saves three children from Mr. Big. This section is "Smooth Criminal" which leads into a performance of "Come Together".
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
In 1919 an art school opened in Germany that would change the world forever. It was called the Bauhaus. A century later, its radical thinking still shapes our lives today. Bauhaus 100 is the story of Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus, and the teachers and students he gathered to form this influential school. Traumatised by his experiences during the Great War, and determined that technology should never again be used for destruction, Gropius decided to reinvent the way art and design were taught. At the Bauhaus, all the disciplines would come together to create the buildings of the future, and define a new way of living in the modern world.
In this story set in near future, a group of young rebels, hippies and 1968 protesters want to cede and make an independent Island from the Mainland. A journalist who came to the Island to make a report about political summit that takes place there gets involved in the clash between young rebels and establishment.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.
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 reality show star leaves her family's TV show fame and unknowingly joins a supernatural cult.
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.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
With input from actor and writer Jan Hlobil, director and cinematographer Rene Smaal presents a film in the true surrealist tradition, in the sense that only 'found' elements were used, and that it defies interpretation based on ordinary cause-and-effect time sequence.
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.
ISLANDS explores a cinematic journey of two astronauts. As they enter Earth’s atmosphere the structure transforms. The spacecraft becomes the meteor from a myth of a tribesman; it triggers an old lady’s memory of a lover from her past. As these diverse characters converge in a plane of reality, we confront a particular form of gravity we covertly feel—falling in love.
Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.