1968-01-01
0
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.
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.
A harrowing, gorgeous, in-your-face-and-mind 45-minute black-and-white film by Marty Topp, produced by Ira Cohen for Universal Mutant. “Marty Topp’s beautiful film of ‘Paradise Now’ reveals how the theories of revolutionary change and the experience of sexual liberation are not separate paths to the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Practiced together they are a single thrust, encompassing both political action and sensual joy, leading to the dreamed-of terrestrial paradise.
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.
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)
An ultra-realistic depiction of life in a Marine Corps brig (or jail) at a camp in Japan in 1957. Marine prisoners are awakened and put through work details for the course of a single day, submitting in the course of it to extremely harsh and shocking physical and mental degradation and abuse.
Jérôme Bel's show features the memories of spectators at the Avignon Festival.
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?
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.
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.
The way Saint Peter explains it to the Devil who's knocking on Heaven's door to collect his share of souls: there will be no more souls, as God has come to doubt if humans are really meant to achieve salvation. If they aren't then how can they be punished posthumous and sent to Hell? There's only one way to make sure if sinning is the human nature, or is it that they simply don't want to better themselves - Devil himself must go down to Earth, in human form, and if he can achieve salvation then so can a human being... Based on A. H. Tammsaare's classic novel of the same name.
The movie reminiscence of the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the military childhood when he one reached the Siberian Winter station where he was waited by the grandmother. The way was unusually long, cold, hungry and angry.
In a godforsaken landscape, filmed in transcendental black and white, as if fallen out of time, young Ada lives alone with her ill mother. Her rather lonely existence is characterized by hard work and poverty and as her mother's condition worsens there doesn't seem to be a way out anymore. Ecce homo is a parable about being human, rich in religious symbolism, which dreamily and at the same time sombrely poses existential questions without volunteering answers.
The pain, the weakness, the silence, the despair. These are some of the feelings faced by a couple lost in drugs. Nights can be seen as the story of people who made mistakes in life, but who still continue to seek happiness. It is about the despair of hopeless lives. The characters are, from the beginning, thrown into an empty and sterile world of indifference. In this true no-man's-land, João and Teresa are confronted with their precarious existence. They are broken pillars of a love that has become silent and painful, they share everything: the house, the drugs, the emptiness and the deprivations of their lives. To make the situation even more dramatic, Teresa falls ill. João does everything to help her, betting on his love for her. He, too, an addict, knows how to ease the pain of his beloved. But unfortunately this help also requires extra money, which forces João to prostitute himself, accelerating his process of destruction and his path to a tragic end.
The famous-notorious Division Brandenburg was (in wartime) under command of Admiral Canaris. But, the death brave division, joined by men, who where not really quite volunteering, received a command: Sulina, a harbour at black sea, where urgently needed oil is turner over, should be prevented from an attack. The plan is worked out and some more men need to volunteer, to let it become real.
A baby has died. Orlo's parents are consumed with grief. In an attempt to make them happy and his family whole again, Orlo does something unexpected.
An emotional goodbye between longtime best friends begins an unexpected love affair, putting two marriages and many friendships at stake.