Documentary

“München – Geheimnisse einer Stadt” ist ein Essay über das Leben in Städten, ein Mosaik aus Geschichten, Sehnsüchten und Träumen und eine Liebeserklärung an München – und alle anderen Städte.Read More »

Quote:
“Why did you come back?” a boy asks his slightly older friend. “For my mother”, the teenager replies. He reflects that he could be in Egypt now, or even further away – a costly, hazardous journey. Many Ethiopians take a different means of escape. They chew the stimulating leaves of the khat plant – now Ethiopia’s most lucrative agricultural product, having overtaken coffee.Read More »

He was the first (blond) fallen angel of rock. By disappearing at the age of 27, drowned in his swimming pool on July 3, 1969, Brian Jones inaugurated the macabre list of rock’s shooting stars: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, all decimated at the same age by a too toxic lifestyle. Mounted very early in London, one of the first “slide guitar” players recruits beginners named Mick Jagger, Keith Richards or Charlie Watts, chooses the name “Rolling Stones”, defines the garage sound and blues, and inspires the bad boy side of the band. But endowed with a shy, insecure temperament, Brian Jones is gradually crushed by the creative power of the Jagger/Richards duo.Read More »

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.Read More »

Quote:
A living chronicle of the residents of Béguinage neighbourhood – so named because it is situated on the site of former Béguinage. Designed as an encyclopaedic inventory, the film comprises around thirty chapters, each imbricated with the other, like so many pieces of a puzzle, or resembling a termite mound with many intersecting galleries. It takes place within the space and interstices of a day, starting at dawn and ending at night. (Boris Lehman)Read More »

Quote:
I’ve been brooding a lot lately about the way in which many of the best movies around have been ravaged by “narrative correctness.” This is the notion fostered by producers, distributors, and critics — often collaborating as script doctors and always deeply invested in hackwork — that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of telling stories in movies. And woe to the filmmaker who steps out of line. Much as “political correctness” can point to a displaced political impotence — a desire to control language and representation that sets in after one despairs of changing the political conditions of power — “narrative correctness” has more to do with what supposedly makes a movie commercial than with what makes it interesting, artful, or innovative. Invariably narrative correctness means identifying with the people who pay for the pictures rather than with the people who make them.Read More »

Eric M. Nilsson’s rich and multi-layered masterpiece Anonym [Anonymous] avoids to be categorized. It’s a TV documentary, an essay film and a detective story at once. It starts with a finding in a container in central Stockholm; film strips, photographies, magazines and other leftover objects. Who is the man reappearing with a crossed out face? Why has this unknown man left this seemingly unfinished work and what’s his motif for staying anonymous? What is the meaning behind all this – if there is any?Read More »

If you watched TV, went to the movies, or listened to the radio in the 80s and 90s, you heard Suzanne Ciani’s work. A five-time Grammy nominated composer, recording artist, and electronic music pioneer, whose sounds have been featured in countless commercials, video games, and feature films. A LIFE IN WAVES is the story of a woman who changed the sound of music and film.Read More »

A short video documentary on Larry Janiak’s time as an instructor at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he taught undergraduate and graduate students for 12 years. Aaron Siskind hired Larry in 1968 to start an experimental live action and animated film area at the school. A narrator introduces Larry’s career and achievements at the school and guides viewers through the animation filmmaking area. The film primarily features footage of a beginning animation course taught by Larry.Read More »