An art-house circuit sensation, this feature-length documentary is visually arresting and possesses a clear, pro-environmental political agenda. Without a story, dialogue, or characters, Koyaanisqatsi (1983) (the film's title is a Hopi word roughly translated into English as "life out of balance") is composed of nature imagery, manipulated in slow ...
Named after a Sufi word that translates roughly as "breath of life" or "blessing," Baraka is Ron Fricke's impressive follow-up to Godfrey Reggio's non-verbal documentary film Koyaanisqatsi. Fricke was cinematographer and collaborator on Reggio's film, and for Baraka he struck out on his own to polish and expand the photographic techniques used on ...
In 2005 a number of provocative, award-winning ads appeared that touted the Helvetica font; Gary Hustwit explores the subject protractedly with his feature-length essay film Helvetica. The documentary, produced in 2007 (and thus commemorating the typeface's 50th anniversary) uses the omnipresent font as a lens, through which it examines ...
Director Sergei Paradjanov made a practice of making highly idiosyncratic films based on the folklore of regions in the former Soviet Union. In 1969 he made this film, based in part on the life of the 18th-century Armenian poet, Sayat Nova ('The King of Song'). Renowned for his writings and his religious lifestyle, Sayat Nova became a martyr when ...
Powaqqatsi was the second of the feature-length "non narrative" films produced, directed and co-scripted by Godfrey Reggio. As in his earlier Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio utilizes a collage of sounds and gimmicked-up images to make a comment on modern life. And as in the earlier film, Reggio's onslaught of imagery is backed up by the music of Philip ...
Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov broke boundaries with his dreamlike vision of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russian Ark. It's the first feature-length narrative film shot in a single take (on digital video, using a specially designed disc instead of tape). Russian Ark is shot from the point-of-view of an unseen narrator, as he explores the ...
Legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once again poses a number of provocative questions about art, politics, and the nexus point between them in this drama in three acts, "Hell," "Purgatory," and "Paradise." After a collage of film clips illustrate a meditation on the nature of war and conflict in society, Godard introduces his central set ...
In the aftermath of the tragedies on September 11, 2001, the French film company Studio Canal called upon a group of filmmakers, representing various regions of the world, to address the scope of the situation in however broad or intimate a context as they saw fit. The one guideline they were given was that no one film could exceed 11 minutes, ...
The final directorial project the legendary Orson Welles completed during his lifetime, F for Fake is less a documentary than an example of cinematic free association on the topic of trickery. Much of the film is in fact drawn from other sources, most notably an unfinished documentary by Francois Reichenbach on the notorious Elmyr de Hory, whose ...
Legendary filmmaker Agnes Varda takes digital camcorder in hand and roams about the French countryside in search of "gleaners." An age-old practice, as depicted in Millet's famous painting, performed traditionally by peasant women, gleaners scavenged the remains of a crop after the harvest. Varda finds their modern-day equivalent collecting ...
Shot by Edward O. Bland in downtown Chicago and originally released in 1959, the half-hour documentary short The Cry of Jazz functions as Bland's foreboding prophecy, predicting the death of jazz as a form of African American expression, and deeply analyzing the racial politic of the music. In its time, The Cry of Jazz also became one of the key ...
The feminine pronoun in the title of this film from Jean-Luc Godard refers to both a French housewife and the city of Paris, as each are changed in fundamental ways by the growth of consumer culture in Europe. Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady) lives with her husband and two children in a high-rise apartment block in Paris. Juliette and her family ...
This seven-hour long epic completes the "German Trilogy" of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, which began with his meditation on the life of Ludwig II of Bavaria and continued with a biography of popular writer Karl May. In this film, he explores the factors in the German psyche which sought for and then deified a man like Hitler. Using absolutely no ...
Filmmaker, philosopher and activist Godfrey Reggio completes the film trilogy he began with Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi in this visually striking examination of the impact of technology upon our culture. Naqoyqatsi is a word from the Hopi language which roughly translates as "war as a way of life" or "a life of killing each other," and in this ...
This obscure film is directed by five well-known cinematographers. "Apathy" is directed by Carlo Lizzani and concerns a New York rape victim whose cries for help fall on deaf ears. Bernardo Bertolucci directs "Agony." Members of the Living Theater mime death scenes. In "The Paper Flower Sequence," directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, a man carries a ...
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is the film most responsible for bringing director Raul Ruiz to international prominence. The intricate film is structured as an unfolding puzzle, a bafflingly complex mystery where the detectives use the techniques of art history. The film is narrated by an art collector and an unnamed interviewer who dissect ...
This 1978 production of Unsichtbare Gegner bears no relationship with the 1933 thriller having the same name. Instead, it is a highly symbolic and experimental work by the Austrian avant-garde director Valerie Export. The faint storyline concerns the effects of a mysterious ray being beamed from outer space by beings known as the Hyksos, who are ...
For Ever Mozart is an episodic film that follows a theater troupe from France attempting to put on a play in Sarajevo. Along their journey they are captured and held in a POW camp, and they call for help from their friends and relations in France. Director Jean-Luc Godard presents stories about this troop to ask how one can make art while ...
Jean-Luc Godard's self-portrait film is a humorous and melancholy reflection on the state of cinema and the world. It is not an autobiography -Godard does not recount the story of his life, but he uses the film to present himself the way a painter would in a self-portrait. Instead of presenting a retrospective of his career, Godard refers to his ...
Titled after a song cycle by Mussorgsky, Sans Soleil is a 1982 nonlinear essay film by elusive documentary filmmaker Chris Marker. It's a collage of images gathered from Japan, Africa, Iceland, San Francisco, and France -- all presented without direct sound. The soundtrack consists of occasional spells of electronic music while an unseen woman's ...
An adventurous experiment in cinematic storytelling, this low-budget independent Thai feature is structured like the Surrealist idea of the "exquisite corpse." One person begins a story, and a succession of others continue it in whatever way they see fit. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul gleans his participants from all over the Thai countryside ...
The first part of Kinoglaz is set in a rural village peopled by Russian peasants. A group of children (referred to as "Young Pioneers") mobilize the adults into the new covenant of Russian society under communism. Since the Young Pioneers can read and keep up with the new Soviet literature, and dutifully poster the town with relevant information, ...
This experimental digital film from writer/director Takahisa Zeze explores love, life, sex, and death throughout the course of five explicit vignettes. Starring Yuji Ishikawa and Takeshi Ito, Tokyo X Erotica was originally released with the subtitle Shibireru Kairaku and screened at the 2002 Rotterdam International Film Festival. ~ Matthew Tobey, ...
A side of London rarely experienced by tourists is seen in this spare, austere mix of narrative film and documentary. The filmmaking team behind Robinson in Space returns to the capitol of the United Kingdom to find out just how much a modern city can change in the short window of seven years. Upon returning to London to tour the city with his ...
Two fictional characters, The Narrator (Paul Scofield) and Robinson, provide the wry commentary for Patrick Keiller's semi-documentary look at contemporary British society. The two have been commissioned by a British advertising company to do a thorough survey of Great Britain in order to discern its "problem," the exact nature of which is never ...
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