The Opening
A gallery owner is opening an unusual exhibition: An artist who is terminally ill wishes to die in front of an audience.
Maigret and the Old Lady
Discovering Hamlet
IN 1988, rising star Kenneth Branagh tackled the role of Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark for the first time in his professional career under the guidance of celebrated actor Derek Jacobi. Narrated by Patrick Stewart, this hour-long film documents how Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi, two intelligent and passionate men, found new depths in Shakespeare’s classic drama, Hamlet. Filmmakers Mark Olshaker and Larry Klein follow the company through four weeks of rehearsals, from the first read-throughs to opening night.
Dream City
Ulysses Jenkins composed "Dream City" from documentation of a twenty-four-hour performance he organized in collaboration with David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. A discordant, absurdist, and poetic montage, the video weaves together jazz and punk shows, recitations by Jenkins, and shots of the Los Angeles skyline and oil wells to comment on power and nation in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible
A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.
Salvador Dalí at Work
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas follows the surrealist artist around the streets of New York documenting staged public art events.
House of Flesh Mannequins
A loner artist with a history of abuse meets a beautiful woman who takes an interest in his life and work; leading to a chilling path of tragedy.
7 Deaths of Maria Callas
A meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain that focuses on the tragic figure of renowned American-Greek opera singer Maria Callas (1923-77), whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century while her life was wracked by scandal and personal suffering.
Himebauch
Using faux archival footage and social media, Adam Himebauch, 38, has created the alter-ego of an artist who rose to fame in the 1970s.
Mi arma
A young drag queen from Andalusia exposes the difficulties of adding aspects of her homeland culture to her artistic expression.
The Quiet Silence
Bustoni, a performing arts worker who lives with his mother who are dying, has a question that distract his life. What will happen to a woman after death?
Pistolteatern
Pistolteatern in Stockholm, Sweden, was a leading experimental scene in the mid 1960s, comparable to the Living Theater in New York. In the years 1964-67. Pistolteatern produced theatre plays, exhibitions and happenings at a very high pace. The name, Pistolteatern, comes from two of creators, PI Lind and STaffan OLzon.
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Feature documentary on the pioneering life and work of iconoclastic filmmaker/musician/composer/artist Tony Conrad.
Eggshells
Created in response to a traumatic hate crime, artist, Venus Patel, explores her emotional journey through several archetypes, each of whom perform with an egg. Using the weapon of the assailant, the egg itself becomes a tool with many psychological and symbolic meanings within it. The power of reincarnation, birth, nature, hope while also pointing to the power it has to utterly humiliate and embarrass if used in a certain way. There is an embrace of the absurdity of these performances while still speaking to the deeper subject matter. By placing the outlandish characters into public spaces, they confront a preconceived notion of pushing true queer expression into only hidden spaces or only at night, into the daylight and into the normal everyday experience.
Marinella Senatore. The School of Narrative Dance, Naples
Through the voice of its founder Marinella Senatore, the video focuses on a few key themes of The School of Narrative Dance project. The artist describes how the nomadic school, founded in 2013, centers on the concept of "assembly" and collective creation which promotes an educational system based on emancipation, inclusion and self-cultivation. A school which continues to travel and has, until now, worked in more than 15 countries in the world and involved some 5 million persons including activists, both amateur and professional workers, dancers, choreographers, actors and poets in an atmosphere of shared knowledge. As the artist speaks, scrolling across the screen are images from the itinerant performance held in Naples in September of 2019.
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV +) and their wife and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their 'Pandrogyne' project.
Psychic TV: First Transmission
For over 30 years, the so-called First Transmission video from Psychic TV, has been the stuff of, well, “snuff film” legend. First advertised in the back pages of Thee Grey Book , The First Transmission was an ultra weird touchstone of the underground VHS tape trading scene of the 1980s.
Freeing The Body
Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically to the sounds of a bongo player. During the early part of the performance, she still has plenty of energy, and she rocks her hips and upper body vigorously to and fro. Over the course of the six hours, exhaustion sets in. Abramović falls back on a single monotonous movement, now and then visibly exerting herself in an attempt to reivigorate her body. After a final convulsive movement, in which she tries to give her all for one last time, she allows herself to collapse onto the floor and remains lying there, completely exhausted. During the performance, Abramović's head was covered by a black scarf. In this way, the audience was not distracted by Abramović as a person or personality, and attention can be focused on the body, which, due to its anonymity, has become an abstraction.
The Big Wheel
During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."
Lurching
A body lurchs through the university.