At the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York, Dr. Janos Martin helps treat patients with severe mental illness by encouraging them to express themselves through art, whether in paint, sculpture, or collage. In vivid imagery, brilliant close-ups, and delicate conversations, director Jessica Yu presents the intricate, often visionary, work of these nontraditional artists, allowing the patients to describe their approaches and processes in their own, sometimes tangled, words. With patience and calm resilience, Dr. Martin offers feedback and ideas for best methods to the individual artists, who sometimes scream or are in tears, as he helps them displace their frustrations, and demons, onto canvas. Seen as a collective, these works illustrate the fine line between creativity and distress and illuminate the healing power of expression.
This movie chronicles the life and times of R. Crumb. Robert Crumb is the cartoonist/artist who drew Keep On Truckin', Fritz the Cat, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comix. Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife, and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind.
What happened to painter Beatriz González, who made us laugh with the irony of her works, to get to the point of making a self-portrait that shows her crying naked? The path of the artist is intimately linked with the history of Colombia during the past fifty years.
African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before, during and after the controversial 2007 presidential election in Senegal and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet – the documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process.
This film without words is composed of Pamela Bone's unique photograhic transparencies. Her talent has been said to 'push photography beyond its own limits, liberating it to the status of an entirely creative art form.' Inspired by nature, and being more responsive to feeling than to thought, Miss Bone has sought to express the mystery and beauty of the inner vision through photographic means alone: landscape has the quality of a dream; children on the sea-shore have a sense of their own enchantment, trees are forboding and strange when night moves in their arms. It took Miss Bone twenty years to find the right technique and so overcome the limitations that photography would impose.
Challenging all notions of genre, Semi Colin is a living, breathing art installation. Part performance, part art, part social comment, Colin philosophizes on his life's obsessive work as an erotic artist.
This independant documentary linking poetry, artistic testimonies and performances offers a positive, innovating outlook on our creativity. It exposes the obstacles that may hinder it as well as the powerful assets creativity provides throughout our lives and in many different fields. Catherine Vidal, neurobiologist and director of the Pastor Institute, Albert Jacquard, geneticist and humanist, Jacques Salomé, social psychologist, Cédric Chapuis, director of performing Arts share their convictions regarding this topic essential to individual and collective development. The film offers a constructive vision inviting viewers to explore their own creativity and emphasizes the importance of placing it at the heart of children’s development through an education based on happiness.
Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)
Adlon recounts the making of the sculpture, "Kugelkaryatide" the sphere that stood in the center of Tobin Plaza between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film follows the sculpture from its creation as the largest bronze sculpture of recent times to the aftermath, where it now stands, heavily scarred, in Battery Park.
The illustrator and author paints scenes from a 70-year-long career, including his work with Roald Dahl. With David Walliams, Joanna Lumley, Peter Capaldi, Ore Oduba and Michael Rosen.
Poème Électronique is an 8-minute piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Varèse, written for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The Philips corporation commissioned Le Corbusier to design the pavilion, which was intended as a showcase of their engineering progress. The pavilion was shaped like a stomach, with a narrow entrance and exit on either side of a large central space. As the audience entered and exited the pavilion, the electronic composition Concret PH by Iannis Xenakis (who also acted as Le Corbusier's architectural assistant for the pavilion's design) was heard. Poème électronique was synchronized to a film of black and white photographs selected by Le Corbusier which touched on vague themes of human existence.
The history of art in Ethiopia. The film emphasizes the styles, materials, etc. ofpaintings on walls and roofs of ancient churche
In 1988, art student Damien Hirst and a group of like-minded associates mounted an exhibition in a building in the East End of London. Entitled Freeze, it was a huge critical and commercial success, propelling Hirst and the group into the spotlight of the avant-garde. More than five years later, Hirst exhibits to international acclaim and is regularly derided in the tabloid press. This portrait of Hirst, which resumes the Omnibus season, is presented as a drug-induced nightmare after Hirst has been put to sleep by a sinister dentist, played by Donald Pleasence. In between interviews with fellow Freeze artists including Angus Fairhurst , Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin , Hirst is seen preparing Mother and Child Divided, his work for last year's Venice Blennale. The piece consists of a cow and a calf, each sawn in half, pickled in formaldehyde and exhibited in four tanks.
Logistics or Logistics Art Project is an experimental art film. At 51,420 minutes (857 hours or 35 days and 17 hours), it is the longest movie ever made. A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality.
The Renaissance master Botticelli spent over a decade painting and drawing hell as the poet Dante described it. The film takes us on a journey through hell with fascinating and exciting insights into Botticelli's art and its hidden story.
Alison Watt became the National Gallery's Seventh Associate Artist in 2006. This art film records her two-year residency, as she created paintings inspired by masterpieces in the National Gallery. She already had a lifelong attachment to paintings in the collection, yet the prolonged contact, particularly with Saint Francis in Meditation by Francisco de Zurbarán, led her to notice new details and unexpected nuances which influenced her own art. Through a series of interviews with Watt, this art film documents the formation of this exhibition, with particular emphasis on the creative process.
From June 2021 to June 2022, Justin "Jastun" Bland records whatever that is in front of him. He presents an abstract montage of collected videos varying from onscreen recordings to filming special, intimate & mundane in-real-life moments. This short captures our daily routines in life and how we choose to spontaneously record them.
From Brooklyn to the Bronx, Soho to Greenwich, Union Square to Wall Street... Join us and the friends, collaborators and gallery owners who supported Jean-Michel Basquiat throughout his life. The first ever recognized graffiti artist, who saw international success as a neo-expressionist painter in the 80s, Basquiat is a true contemporary hero who died at the peak of his career.