Paradise Now: The Living Theater in Amerika(1969)

Emergency: The Living Theatre(en)

a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)

Rite of Guerrilla Theater(en)

Commissioned work by Julian Beck and members of The Living Theatre (featuring Beck and Judith Malina, co-founders of The Living Theatre, in performance) for broadcast on KQED-TV, San Francisco. The Dilexi Series represents a pioneering effort to present works created by artists specifically for broadcast.

The Connection(en)

A title card announces that the film is a result of found footage assembled by cameraman J.J. Burden working for the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jim Dunn, who has disappeared. Leach, a heroin addict, introduces the audience to his apartment where other heroin addicts, a mix of current and former jazz musicians, are waiting for Cowboy, their drug connection, to appear. Things go out of control as the men grow increasingly nervous and the cameraman keeps recording.

Love and Anger(it)

Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.

The Connection(en)

A professional recording of the official play. The play has a play-within-a-play format, with characters Jim Dunn as the "producer" and Jaybird as the "writer" attempting to stage a production about the underbelly of society using "real" addicts. Some of the addicts are jazz musicians. They all (except for the "producer", "writer", and two "photographers") have one thing in common: they are waiting for their drug dealer, their "connection". The dialogue of the characters is interspersed with jazz music.

The Brig(en)

Jonas Mekas’s film captures The Living Theatre’s stage production of The Brig, an unflinching portrait of life inside a U.S. Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. Over the course of a single day, prisoners endure relentless drills, abuse, and dehumanization, exposing the brutality of military discipline with stark immediacy.

Après la Passion selon Sade(fr)

Paradise Now(en)

At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressionist colouring 'injected' by electronic means, this emerges as a hypnotic transmutation of a theatrical event into poetic cinema, capturing the ambiance and frenzy of the original. No documentary record could have done it justice.

This American Wife(en)

The body of a Real Housewife is an apparatus, an assembly of parts—hair, lips, dress, falsies, mic pack, cell phone, wine stem, camera, restaurant, brand, identity. This body is maintained and degraded, intoxicated and cleansed, in seasons and cycles, systems of supply and denial. The self needs a medium. Who cares who you are when you’re alone anymore?

Cour d'honneur de Jérôme Bel - Avignon 2013(fr)

Jérôme Bel's show features the memories of spectators at the Avignon Festival.

Promises to Keep(en)

An aging cowboy returns to the family he abandoned 30 years ago with a terrifying secret.

An Innocent Love(en)

This romantic drama focuses on the romance between a 14-year-old mathematics genius and a 19-year-old All-American volleyball player.

Rockin' the Wall(en)

Rock and roll's part in bringing down the Berlin Wall and smashing the Iron Curtain is told from the perspective of rockers who played at the time, on both sides of the Wall, and from survivors of the communist regimes who recall the lifeline that rock music provided them.

Baharon Ke Sapne(hi)

In a small industrial town near Bombay lives Bholanath, who works at the local mill, and is the proud husband of Gauri, a daughter, Champa, and above all his son, Ramaiya, who is a graduate in the arts faculty, - the only one in this town who has attained this degree. But times are hard, and jobs are difficult to come by. When Bholanath loses his job, Ramaiya decides to find employment, and does so as a menial worker in the same mill his dad used to work. Ramaiya is very popular with his co-workers and they soon elect him as their new union leader. This puts Ramaiya in conflict with the Management of the Mill, headed by the owner, Kapoor, who has ordered that Ramaiya be eliminated post haste. But Ramaiya is determined to address the workers' grievances, and he gets himself framed for theft; has the police on the lookout for him, and so Ramaiya goes into hiding.

A Holiday Romance(en)

A superintendent, trying to save his high school's troubled finances, falls in love with a teacher whose music program he must cut.