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Chantal Akerman followed famous Choreographer Pina Bausch and her company of dancers, The Tanzteater Wuppertal, for five weeks while they were on tour in Germany, Italy and France. Her objective was to capture Pina Bausch’s unparalleled art not only on stage but also behind the scenes.Read More »
Michael Billington:
There are many ways of approaching Shakespeare’s youthful tragedy: Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh take the scenic route in this new production. We are plunged into a vividly imagined 1950s Italy of dark-suited men, petticoated women, bicycling friars, patriarchal oppression and frantic partying. You feel Fellini is due any moment to film it with a movie camera and, even if the result has its oddities, the production certainly has a pulsating energy.Read More »
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Iconoclast Lenny Bruce appears at San Francisco’s Basin Street West in what was his next-to-last live appearance. His act that night consisted of reading allegations and transcripts from one of his several obscenity trials and then commenting on what he’d actually done or said. While there are some “bits” in the performance (including the prison riot with Dutch, the Warden, Father Flotski, and Sabu, the prison doctor), this is much more a social commentary on government intrusion and censorship than it is a comedy routine.Read More »
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Heavy Metal Me is a DVD release by Japanese band Boris. It consists of various live material, video material, and Heavy Metal Me, a short film which is in Japanese and English. The “A Bao A Qu” music video is based on the 7″ version of the song with both sides placed together into a 9-minute music video. “The Evil One Which Sobs” is a remix video of the song from Dronevil. Lastly, there are live versions of the songs “Feedbacker” and “Flood”.Read More »
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Dirty Hands is a 1948 play written by Jean-Paul Sartre. Of all his plays this was the most discussed and opposed because of its political content, the problems raised, the instrumentalization of which it was the object. The story told, although transposed into a fictitious world, is inspired by the assassination of Leon Trotsky by his secretary Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent.Read More »
Richard Strauss’ opera is featured in a landmark collaboration by conductor Karl Boehm and director Goetz Friedrich. Boehm died shortly after the film was completed. Featured soloists include Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Catarina Ligendza, Hans Beirer ad Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among others. There is also a full-length documentary included in this program.
Filmed on location on the outskirts of Vienna, director Gotz Friedrich vividly creates the staggering impact of the tragedy of vengeance. Karl Boehm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.Read More »
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Prospero, the deposed King of Milan who lives in exile on a remote island as a sorcerer uses his powers to shipwreck his usurper brother on the island.Read More »
Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »
