“Michael Smith is a big baby. Well, not all the time. But when he gets into his droopy diapers and lacy bonnet, adds sunglasses and a pacifier, and totters around on his stumpy legs as Baby Ikki, he’s as riveting to watch as any real toddler, albeit larger, hairier and a bit scary. Mr. Smith, the multitalented performer, video maker and multimedia artist, has been doing this character for about 30 years, and it never gets old.

For his latest escapade Baby Ikki went to Burning Man, the weeklong celebration of all things psychedelic that takes place every summer in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A film crew followed him as he wandered around the festival in white Crocs, and the resulting footage is the heartbeat of “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” a wonderfully entertaining and slyly thought-provoking collaboration between Mr. Smith and Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles artist known for, among other things, sculptures made of old, grubby stuffed animals and children’s blankets.

Occupying the SculptureCenter’s main space, the installation features a half-dozen large flat screens showing various phases of Baby Ikki’s day and night peregrinations, which cumulatively add up to an odyssey. In the gallery is a set of tubular metal structures resembling children’s playground climbing equipment, which includes one shaped like a rocket and a geodesic dome skeleton whose floor is covered with stuffed animals. This emphasizes a view of Burning Man as an essentially juvenile gathering. The boyish optimism of Modernist futurism — as in the inventions of Buckminster Fuller — is evoked by these jungle gymlike sculptures.

Looming over all is a colossal sculpture of Baby Ikki made of welded-together junk metal, which parodies the towering wooden sculpture with the emblematic figure that is climactically set on fire every year at Burning Man.

The videos start with Baby Ikki playing in the motor home that brought him to the event. Evidently preoccupied by fire, he clicks on a cigarette lighter, turns on the gas-fired stove top and consumes candy fireballs while horror-movie scenes of a woman threatened by flames plays on a television.

Outside he ambulates among campers dressed in all kinds of fanciful costumes, gesturing with clumsily splayed fingers at people and objects of interest. Occasionally he belts vehicles — done up like animals for a parade — with the stuffed green creature he carries around in one arm. All the while he maintains an expression of melancholic, slightly quizzical impassivity.

When night comes, he visits some of the elaborate, walk-in environments created by various campers and observes people dancing, twirling flaming batons and otherwise expressing themselves. At one point three minimally dressed women pull him onstage and writhe around him like lap dancers. Finally, all tuckered out, he finds a cushion-covered floor and falls asleep.

Baby Ikki seems to fit right in amid all the zanily attired burners, but he’s not one of them. He’s a kind of mole, a secret agent with his own agenda. Clearly Mr. Smith and Mr. Kelley designed their project not to celebrate but to mock the Burning Man circus. To substitute a giant baby for its wooden avatar is to suggest that the festival is driven by infantilism.

Contrary to the old hippie fantasy that expanding consciousness through unbridled fun, creativity and hedonism — and of course psychotropic drugs — will transform the world for the better, they imply that Burning Man is naïve and disingenuously complicit with capitalist consumerism. It becomes a symbol of what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation,” which reroutes unruly and rebellious instinctual energies into politically harmless sybaritic indulgence, escapist entertainment and spiritual delusion.

There have been times when anarchic revelry seemed like a good way to resist and overturn socially limiting mores. The antics of the Dadaists in the 1920s and the high jinks of the Merry Pranksters in the ’60s were, perhaps, genuinely liberating. But now that Dionysian catharsis has become the promise of beer commercials and spring-break debauchery, behaving “wildly” is no longer so threatening to the status quo.

This does not make the Smith-Kelley project antipsychedelic. A politics of paranoia that finds everywhere the surreptitious, systematic curbing of individual freedoms and democratic initiative has always been part of the counterculture psyche. Yet this sort of suspicious mind-set can be diverted into less troublesome endeavors like “institutional critique,” the academically certified type of conceptualism that views art museums as agents of consciousness control and puts its faith in the analytic powers of the properly trained intellect.

The Smith-Kelley project is an unusually imaginative and funny instance of “institutional critique,” assuming it is fair to call Burning Man an institution. Admittedly, satirizing the festival and its associated New Age culture is like shooting fish in a barrel. (Borat could have a field day there.) But there are moments in the videos of considerable metaphorical and emotional urgency, as when we see Baby Ikki alone in the distance, almost lost in a dust storm, or when he falls asleep and dreams of women’s breasts.

In the Fellini-like scene with the three dancers, he’s like Odysseus enduring the call of the sirens. It’s less the tendentious didacticism than the comic, mythological vision that makes it compelling.

But the tension between ideological critique and carnivalesque rebellion — a schism that has been running through American radicalism for over a century — is something to think about too. A choice between purity of spirit and exuberance of soul.”

Director: Mike Kelley, Michael Smith
Writers: Mike Kelley, Michael Smith
Cast: Michael Smith
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 26mn

Voyage Of Growth And Discovery (Mike Kelley And Michael Smith 2009).mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 26 min
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https://nitro.download/view/F026C5B1F2AA758/Voyage_Of_Growth_And_Discovery_(Mike_Kelley_And_Michael_Smith_2009).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Kelley and Michael Smith – A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A man wanders the streets of a small provincial town, obsessed by the idea of meddling in the lives of others. He meets various characters to whom, by asking their permission, he reveals vices and limitations hidden in their souls. It is the only act he is able to perform: anger and the desire to smash everything have given way to imagination and small marginal observations.

Director: Marco Bellocchio
Writers: Marco Bellocchio
Cast: Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, Giorgia Fasce, Federica Ombrato
Producer: Simone Gattoni
Cinematography: Paolo Ferrari
Production Company: Kavac Film, RAI Cinema, Fondazione Fare Cinema
Country: Italy
Language: Italian
Runtime: 18mn

Se posso permettermi (Marco Bellocchio, 2024) WEB-DL.mkv

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Runtime: 	19 min 47 s
Size: 	716 MiB
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https://nitro.download/view/652697035352277/Se_posso_permettermi_(Marco_Bellocchio,_2024)_WEB-DL.srt

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Marco Bellocchio – Se posso permettermi (2021) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Portrait of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature.

Quote:
“The very thing that brought the thing to be is the thing that will cause its death,” Goldsworthy explains, as his elegant, spiraled constructions once again become random piles of stones on the beach. As with Andy’s stones, so with our lives.

“Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time” is a documentary that opened in San Francisco in mid-2002 and just kept running, moving from one theater to another, finding its audience not so much through word of mouth as through hand on elbow, as friends steered friends into the theater, telling them that this was a movie they had to see. I started getting e-mails about it months ago. Had I seen it? I hadn’t even heard of it.

It is a film about a man wholly absorbed in the moment. He wanders woods and riverbanks, finding materials and playing with them, fitting them together, piling them up, weaving them, creating beautiful arrangements that he photographs before they return to chaos. He knows that you can warm the end of an icicle just enough to make it start to melt, and then hold it against another icicle, and it will stick. With that knowledge, he makes an ice sculpture, and then it melts in the sun and is over.

Some of his constructions are of magical beauty, as if left behind by beings who disappeared before the dawn. He finds a way to arrange twigs in a kind of web. He makes a spiral of rocks that fans out from a small base and then closes in again, a weight on top holding it together. This is not easy, and he gives us pointers: “Top control can be the death of a work.” Often Andy will be … almost there … right on the edge … holding his breath as one last piece goes into place … and then the whole construction will collapse, and he will look deflated, defeated, for a moment (“Damn!”), and then start again: “When I build something, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that’s a very beautiful balance.” His art needs no explanation. We go into modern art galleries and find work we cannot comprehend as art. We see Damien Hurst’s sheep, cut down the middle and embedded in plastic, and we cannot understand how it won the Turner Prize (forgetting that no one thought Turner was making art, either). We suppose that Concepts and Statements are involved.

But with Andy Goldsworthy, not one word of explanation is necessary, because every single one of us has made something like his art. We have piled stones or made architectural constructions out of sand, or played Pick-Up Stix, and we know exactly what he is trying to do–and why. Yes, why, because his art takes him into that Zone where time drops away and we forget our left-brain concerns and are utterly absorbed by whether this … could go like this … without the whole thing falling apart.

The documentary, directed, photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, a German filmmaker, goes home with Goldsworthy to Penpont, Scotland, where we see him spending some time with his wife and kids. It follows him to a museum in the South of France, and to an old stone wall in Canada that he wants to rebuild in his own way. It visits with him old stone markers high in mountains, built by early travelers to mark the path.

And it offers extraordinary beauty. We watch as he smashes stones to release their cyan content and uses that bright-red dye to make spectacular patterns in the currents and whirlpools of streams. We see a long rope of linked leaves, bright green, uncoil as it floats downstream. Before, we saw only the surface of the water, but now the movement of the leaves reveals its current and structure. What a happy man. Watching this movie is like daydreaming.

Director: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Writers: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Cast: Andy Goldsworthy, Anna Goldsworthy, Holly Goldsworthy
Producer: Leslie Hills, Trevor Davies, Annedore von Donop
Cinematography: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Music: Fred Frith
Production Company: YLE, Mediopolis Film- und Fernsehproduktion, Skyline Productions, WDR
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 30mn

Rivers and Tides (2001).mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 30 min
Size: 	2.69 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/71386EEC4B65B92/Rivers_and_Tides_(2001).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

Many thanks to @Gene for this copy

The post Thomas Riedelsheimer – Rivers and Tides (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“For months we experimented and represented ourselves, starting with simple walks in search of material for a thesis. How can we visually recreate a memory? We walked and filmed, photographed and painted, got to know each other and told our stories. An experience transformed into a story that speaks of a shared journey, made up of filming, changes of season, conversations about the moon, and exchanges of techniques. Inspired by “Dark Side of the Moon,” we tried to represent the intimate and personal emotions that came to us through the album. Each song has a language, each movement a color, each sound an expression. What remains today, half a century later? Something inexplicable, perhaps. A wonderful creation of friendship and mutual artistic esteem, the (re)creation of multiple memories, which overlap like membranes on the screen.“
Erik Negro

Director: Erik Negro, Bea Morino
Writers: Erik Negro, Bea Morino
Cinematography: Erik Negro
Country: Italy
Language: Italian
Runtime: 43mn

Return to the Moon (or Nothing)_(2023)_Erik Negro_1080p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	47 min 2 s
Size: 	1.69 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
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https://nitro.download/view/6163AA63D439273/Return_to_the_Moon_(or_Nothing)_(2023)_Erik_Negro_1080p.mkv

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Erik Negro & Bea Morino – Return to the Moon (or Nothing) (2026) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

New York City, 1985. Prior Walter announces to his boyfriend Louis Ironson that he has been diagnosed with AIDS. Unable to cope with this, Louis leaves. This abandonment leaves Prior shattered. At the same time, Roy Cohn, a powerful lawyer and a right-wing political conservative is diagnosed with AIDS but demands that his doctor say that he has liver cancer as he does not want his homosexuality known in the circles he moves in. Cohn grooms his assistant, the milquetoast Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt, to go to Washington in order to protect him from a disbarment trial. At the same time Joe’s wife Harper has become deeply unhappy and addicted to valium over the fact that Joe does not seem to want her sexually. Joe finally comes out and admits that he is fighting homosexual desires. When he calls to tell his mother that he is gay, she sells up everything she has in Salt Lake City and rushes to New York to help, but Joe has vanished – in fact has met and taken up with Louis. As he becomes increasingly more ill, Prior receives visitations from a female angel who has sex with him and then implants a holy book inside his body, telling him that he is a prophet and must sound the warning that human progress be stopped. And as Cohn falls ill in hospital, the ghost of the Communist spy Ethel Rosenberg, whom he helped convict and execute, comes to gloat at his nearing death.

The play/mini-series is largely designed to confront modern American attitudes towards homosexuality and the reactions to the AIDS scare during its first appearance. All of the characters have been designed to reflect some facet of this – from drag and flamboyant camp to the closeted man struggling within the social expectations of a marriage and of course the conservative religious reaction. The most fascinating of these is the character of lawyer Roy Cohn played by Al Pacino. What many do not realize is that Roy Cohn was a real figure, who was active in the Communist witch hunts conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s, where he was McCarthy’s chief legal council and most famously headed that the trial that tried and executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1953 for supposedly passing classified information to the Soviets. The fascinating fact about Roy Cohn was that he was also gay and died of AIDS in 1986, although vehemently denied that he was gay or infected right up until his death. Moreover Cohn also quite hypocritically supported ardent right wing issues and the prosecution of many others for being gay. At the end of the mini-series, Tony Kushner finally reaches an almost Utopian vision of harmony and hope for the future. The final scene has all the remaining characters directly addressing the camera and Justin Kirk offering what is clearly a manifesto upon Kushner’s part: “This disease [AIDS] will be the end of many of us. But not nearly all of us … And we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths any more. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens when the time has come.”

Director: Mike Nichols
Writers: Tony Kushner
Cast: Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson,
Producer: Paul A. Levin, Celia D. Costas
Cinematography: Stephen Goldblatt
Music: Thomas Newman
Production Company: HBO, Films Avenue Pictures, Avenue Entertainment
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 00mn

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https://nitro.download/view/553CA5101EF4CBB/Angels_In_America_-_Part_6.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Nichols – Angels in America (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Gwen is in her last year of high school. Her mother has just died. She lives in Morlaix, a small town in Brittany, France. In the middle of the year, Jean-Luc arrives, a sophisticated, cultured and magnetic Parisian.

Director: Jaime Rosales
Writers: Jaime Rosales, Samuel Doux, Fanny Burdino
Cast: Aminthe Audiard, Samuel Kircher, Hugo Le Rolle
Producer: Jaime Rosales, Michel Klein, Jérôme Dopffer, Bárbara Díez
Cinematography: Javier Ruiz Gómez
Music: Leonor Rosales March
Production Company: Iwaso Films, Fresdeval Films
Country: France
Language: French
Runtime: 2h 04mn

Quote:
Morlaix can, at times, feel overly staged and even bordering on cheesy – but it seems to all be part of the filmmaker’s grand plan to get one thinking in a more Brechtian way. Rosales uses the city’s distinctive architecture to his advantage, including setting the movie’s most pivotal scenes on the viaduct bridge that towers above the settlement, where Gwen is forced into making a crucial decision. With this choice, the filmmaker suggests that maybe there’s something about coming to this very town that has trapped us, for better or for worse, in a beautiful but tragic cycle of reminiscence and nostalgia. – Olivia Popp | Cineuropa

	
Morlaix.2025.1080p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 58 min
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https://nitro.download/view/16ABBCB0EDD6E25/Morlaix.2025.1080p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Spanish

The post Jaime Rosales – Morlaix (2025) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A video about Neo-Nazis originating in Sweden provides the starting point of an investigation of extremists’ networks in Europe, North America and Russia. Their propaganda is a message of hatred, war and segregation.

Director: Daniel Schweizer
Writers: Daniel Schweizer
Cast: Daniel Schweizer, Christine Brand, Olivier Cochet
Producer: Samir Belghiti, Matthieu Belghiti
Cinematography: Piotr Jaxa, Johannes Imdahl
Music: Tapani Rinne
Production Company: Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion AG
Country: Switzerland
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 30mn

White.Terror.2005.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Runtime: 	1h 29mn
Size: 	1.59 GiB
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Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
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https://nitro.download/view/E97CF76C117DC07/White.Terror.2005.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English, French, German, Russian dialogs
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)

The post Daniel Schweizer – White Terror (2005)  first appeared on Cinema of the World.