Hito Steyerl is a Berlin-based artist and writer who’s new work, Liquidity Inc., is presented here. Liquidity Inc., which exhibited at the London Institute of Contemporary Art in April 2014, takes up liquidity as a concept in all of its physical, metaphorical, bodily, spiritual, meteorological and financial forms. In the main the film follows Jacob Wood a financial worker fired during the recent major economic crisis who now has a career in mixed martial arts.Read More »
Synopsis: On July 16th, 1950, in Maracana Stadium, eleven men, eleven uruguayans, won against all possible predictions the FIFA World Cup final against the host country, Brazil. This accomplishment would shape the social and political life of both countries forever.Read More »
Filmed over three years on China’s railways, THE IRON MINISTRY traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. THE IRON MINISTRY immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.Read More »
Breadcrumb Trail is a 90-minute documentary about Slint and their classic 1991 album Spiderland. It’s directed by Lance Bangs and includes interviews with the band, plus James Murphy, Steve Albini, David Yow, Ian MacKaye, Matt Sweeney, and others.Read More »
Quote:
A documentary triptych about a group of homeless kids, who have survived their drug-addicted childhood, grew up and start to live an adult life. It’s a story about a boy facing the surreal, degenerated society of his native village full of hate and sadistic anger while searching for his mother. It’s a story about a pregnant girl who wants to give birth to her child whose childhood probably will be even worse then hers. But her own sisters are forcing her to make an abortion.Read More »
Description:
The phrase “Graphic Sexual Horror” actually derives from the all-caps warning that would greet visitors at the threshold to the “Insex.Com” Web site during its heyday roughly a decade ago. But one can’t be blamed for thinking that the title pairs well with the somewhat sensationalistic marketing. The fact that this is a documentary is never concealed, but that doesn’t really diminish the lurid appeal – in fact, the promise that everything is real only adds to the titillation.
Of course that’s the same lure of realism that attracted some 35,000 subscribers to Brent “PD” Scott’s unique BDSM online community and interactive gallery. Shooting on stark sets sporting a rundown, industrial look and featuring a grim, deadpan aesthetic that gave some the impression that PD “really had captured the girls,” the Insex team specialized in creative live feed sessions that allowed customers to provide real-time input and feedback. The young models would frequently plead for mercy from all sorts of gnarly acts of sadism, but per S/M protocol there was always a “safe word” in reserve that they could invoke if things became too unbearable.Read More »
“For the first decades of their existence, movies were seen not as works of art deserving preservation but as disposable commodities. The notion that they might be preserved, collected and studied was in the air by the mid-1930’s, but it took the pluck and persistence of a single eccentric Frenchman to make the idea a reality. The name of Henri Langlois — subject of “Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque,” a long, affectionate documentary directed by Jacques Richard — is not as well known as those of some directors whose work and reputations he saved from oblivion. Still, Mr. Richard’s film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art. And he was, after his own fashion, an artist — a collector and curator with the temperament of a poet. A shabbily dressed, chain-smoking walrus of a man, Langlois emerges in the course of this fascinating film as a maddening, inspiring figure, afire with intelligence and passion.”Read More »
(Chicago reader capsule ) :
“Released in three parts, Patricio Guzman’s epic documentary The Battle of Chile (1975-’79) captured such critical events as the bombing of the presidential palace during the 1973 military coup, but it wasn’t screened in Chile until the 1990s. That belated premiere inspired Guzman to make this 1997 documentary, in which clips from the earlier film are threaded among interviews and powerful sequences showing the reactions of Chilean viewers. Whereas The Battle of Chile uses voice-over narration to summarize its on-the-spot footage, manipulated only minimally by editing, Chile, Obstinate Memory is more expansive. Without ignoring or hyperbolizing the way politics affects our sense of the past, it presents many galvanizing moments; at one point a viewer who was a child during the coup shamefacedly recalls his pleasure at being allowed to stay home from school”Read More »
Synopsis of Part 3:
THE BATTLE OF CHILE (3): The Power of the People (1978) deals with the creation by ordinary workers and peasants of thousands of local groups of “popular power” to distribute food, occupy, guard and run factories and farms, oppose black market profiteering, and link together neighborhood social service organizations. First these local groups of “popular power” acted as a defense against strikes and lock-outs by factory owners, tradesmen and professional bodies opposed to the Allende government, then increasingly as Soviet-type bodies demanding more resolute action by the government against the right.Read More »