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The film is part of the television series “La culture en chantiers” (“Culture under Construction”). In the form of a video letter, this film goes up the Seine. Starting with the traces of the Normandy landing of the Americans, it ends in Paris in Jean Genet’s hotel room. It is a voyage made to meditate on the “state of things” in a clear and melancholy way—the mutations in cinema and the media in the year of the Gulf War, in the company of Serge Daney and others.Read More »
A behind-the-scene account of the porn world and its stars as they’ve never been seen before – and the no-holds-barred portrait of a true giant.
Rocco Siffredi is to pornography what Mike Tyson is to boxing or Mick Jagger is to rock’n’roll: a living legend. His mother wanted him to be a priest; with her blessing he became a hardcore performer, devoting his life to one God only: Desire. Rocco Siffredi reveals all, even if it sometimes means busting his own myth: his true story, beginnings, career, wife and children… and the ultimate revelation that will change his life forever. A behind-the-scenes account of the porn world and its stars as they’ve never been seen before – the no-holds-bard portrait of a true giant.Read More »
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The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch features the exhibition ‘Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of Genius’ at Het Noordbrabants Museum in the southern Netherlands, which brought the majority of Bosch’s paintings and drawings together for the first time to his home town of Den Bosch and attracted almost half a million art lovers from all over the world. With his fascinating life revealed plus the details and stories within his works seen like never before, don’t miss this cinematic exploration of a great creative genius.Read More »
This film does not deal with Chernobyl, but rather with the world of Chernobyl, about which we know very little. Eyewitness reports have survived: scientists, teachers, journalists, couples, children… They tell of their old daily lives, then of the catastrophe. Their voices form a long, terrible but necessary supplication which traverses borders and stimulates us to question our status quo.Read More »
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Interviews with a procurer and with nineteen boys and young men who are prostitutes in Prague. The youths range in age from 14 to 19. They hustle at the central train station and at clubs. Most of their clients are foreign tourists, many are German. The youths talk about why they hustle, their first trick, prices, dangers, what they know about AIDS, their fears (disease and loneliness), and how they imagine their futures. The film’s title, its liturgical score, much of it elegiac, and shots of the city’s statues of angels underline the vulnerability and callow lack of sophistication of the young men.Read More »
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In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in the 11th arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ’60s. It is the best, and certainly the funniest, of self-reflexive deconstructions of the documentary form. Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from shot/reverse shot ‘suture’ and talking-head experts to establishing shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: “Include street interviews ad absurdum”.) Every fragment of reality (e.g. polling booths on voting day) comes through the lens as a pre-fabricated televisual cliché. And, as always, Ruiz detonates his own auteur status.As an essay-film, Great Events contains many echoes – and a cheeky critique – of the sophisticated political filmmaking of Chris Marker. But Ruiz increasingly spices up the lesson with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles and gestures.Read More »
This hypnotic documentary by cinephile par excellence Mark Cousins takes a brave – but increasingly rewarding – abstract angle by seeking through aesthetic rather than conventional exposition to capture the strange, sensory ethos of the Atomic age (a period spanning approximately 1940-60 but having a far-reaching legacy up to the present day). Using Mogwai’s ethereal electronic soundtrack as his conduit, Cousins takes us through the history of the Atomic period through sound and image alone (there is no overt narration) – even trying ambitiously to suggest that splitting the atom and creating atomic weapons were not in themselves immediately malign developments but almost the end-game of a form of evolution, and symbol of mankind’s mastery over the properties of his planet. Hence Cousins finds in the famous, awe-inspiring images of atomic mushroom clouds a correlation with more common sights of proliferation in nature (a bud that grows, a flower that blooms, sperm that fertilises an egg).Read More »
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March, 2007.
The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”Read More »
