The definitive documentary that reviews the enormous career of Esther Ferrer, one of the great Spanish creators in the performance genre. A "hybrid" between the documentary and the discipline of performance itself, between recording and creation, which uses elements and techniques typical of the cinematographic genre on which animation and self-created elements are superimposed.
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Corpo Presente (2024)
A hybrid feature film that investigates contemporaneity through the body and its countless possibilities of expression and meanings. The film puts the body and the idea of the body in evidence, through metalanguage, articulation and confrontation of documentary, fictional and performative languages. The film follows the trajectory of the main character who uses her own body to formulate universes and investigate the meanings that are drawn in it. In a kind of subjective diary written on her skin, she records sensations and reflections, building relationships with thinkers, performances and archival materials, which lead her to other bodies and other stories.
Balkan Baroque (1999)
Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rather than a mechanical reproduction of the artist's work, the film tries to create a new reality by translating the performances into cinematographic images that intensify the fictional context of the film. Abramovic plays herself, but ,appearing in multiple forms, blurs her own identity. Memories and fantasies intermingle with day to day rituals. The chronological narrative often breaks to reflect the interior voyage of the protagonist from the present to the past and back to the present. The result is a visually impressive film. Balkan Baroque had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 1999.
Fall 1 (1970)
Bas Jan Ader's first fall film shows him seated on a chair, tumbling from the roof of his two-storey house in the Inland Empire.
I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971)
This short film is part of a mixed media artwork of the same name, which also included postcards of Ader crying, sent to friends of his, with the title of the work as a caption. The film was initially ten minutes long, and included Ader rubbing his eyes to produce the tears, but was cut down to three and a half minutes. This shorter version captures Ader at his most anguished. His face is framed closely. There is no introduction or conclusion, no reason given and no relief from the anguish that is presented.
Broken Fall (Geometric) (1971)
One of a series of ‘falls’ by Bas Jan Ader that he recorded on film, this work was filmed in West Kapelle, Holland in 1970.
Broken Fall (Organic) (1971)
Bas Jan Ader hangs from the branch of a tall tree, until he loses his grip and falls into a river below.
Nightfall (1971)
Shot in his garage-studio, the camera records Ader painstakingly hoisting a large brick over his shoulder. His figure is harshly lit by two tangles of light bulbs. He drops the brick, crushing one strand of lights. He again lifts the brick, allowing tension to accrue. The climax inevitable—the brick falls and crushes the second set of lights. Here the film abruptly ends, all illumination extinguished.
Blue Man Group: The Complex Rock Tour Live (2003)
Offbeat performance artists The Blue Man Group have finally been captured live on this disc that features concert footage, three full-length music videos and three songs from Blue Man Group's album, "The Complex." The live footage was filmed during Blue Man Group's successful and widely acclaimed August 2003 rock tour, where they wowed 9,000 fans in two sold-out concerts.
Discovering Hamlet (1990)
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.
Pussy Versus Putin (2013)
In 2012 two members of anarchistic female band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a Mordovian labor camp for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Russian film collective Gogol’s Wives follow each step of the feminist punk band’s battle against Putin including their first disruptive performances on a trolley bus, shooting a video about transparent elections, a controversial performance in a Red Square cathedral, and footage shot in a jail cell. Support comes from many corners including Madonna who painted the words "Pussy Riot" on her back and wore a balaclava during her Moscow show. The documentary portrays the grim state of present-day Russia, a country starkly divided between conservatism and anarchy. Pussy Riot believes that art has to be free and they're willing to take it to extremes. "Pussycat made a mess in the house," they say, and the house is Russia. The filmmakers do not seek to moralize, they simply edit events and leave viewers to draw their own conclusions.
Feminine Singular (2023)
A documentary featuring 30 Argentinian women aged between 4 and 80, sharing their stories of resilience, strength, and unique perspectives on womanhood through performance art.
DJ Punk: The Photographer Daniel Josefsohn (2018)
Nobody captured the atmosphere of 1990s Berlin better than German photographer Daniel Josefsohn, who died in 2016 at the age of 54, leaving his mark in advertising with his irreverent aesthetic and punk sensibility. It was his spontaneous, imperfect images shot for an MTV campaign in 1994 that first made him famous.
Meat Joy (1964)
"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."
Sandra Bernhard: Confessions of a Pretty Lady (1994)
Bernhard, an actress-comedienne whose brassy humor attracts a cult-like following, here offers a semiconfessional view of her life's landscape. Childhood memories of her father, a doctor, and her mother, an artist, are warmly rendered in scenes of the Jewish family amiably accommodating itself to the Christmas season, and of the obligatory communal vacations joined by colorful relatives. The abrupt transition to a flamboyant denizen of "downtowns," Los Angeles or New York, to an existence as a character in the lives of marginal people, is evoked in sharply satirical terms, in a melange of humorous fact and fiction, monologues akin to those that make Bernhard an icon of pop culture.
Relation in Space (1977)
In the first 58 minute Performance, Relation in Space, which took place in July 1976 at the Biennale in Venice, Abramovic/Ulay, both naked, walk towards each other from opposite ends of a room, touching as they pass each other, and then they repeat the movement while their bodies collide and one of them (Marina) falls over under the impact, until they are both exhausted. A statically mounted video camera simultaneously filmed the touching of the bodies in the middle of the room.
Looking for Richard (1996)
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
The Big Wheel (1980)
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."
Exhalación: vida y muerte de De La Puríssima (2019)
The duo made up of musician and actress Julia de Castro and double bass player Miguel Rodrigáñez thus premieres their latest show, Exhalación: vida y muerte de De La Puríssima. With it, they intend to put an end to the ten-year revolution of EL CUPLÉ this scenic musical genre, which the singular tandem has merged with jazz, cumbia and electronics on stages around the world. Show nominated for the Premios Valle Inclán. As the duo explains, De La Puríssima was born in 2009 “as a transit project, in which music was the most direct and ritualistic medium from which to raise core issues such as sex, bullfighting, folklore or religion”. Now, a decade later, it is time to remove the peineta and celebrate the end of a stage in which the provocative lyrics by Julia de Castro have traveled through numerous audiences to bring up to date a genre that was in the forgetfulness of national folklore, the cuplé.
Marinella Senatore. The School of Narrative Dance, Naples (2020)
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.