Performance

‘Event for a Stage’ is a 16mm film I made in 2015 with the actor Stephen Dillane. I normally project the work as film inside galleries and museums, and occasionally cinemas. I have always been steadfast about showing my films in the medium with which they were made and were always intended to be shown. I have therefore never allowed them to be streamed online or ever projected digitally. Film is a very different way of making and seeing a work, and over the years, I have campaigned to keep photochemical mediums available to artists and filmmakers, and I have found that I have done this best this by continuing to make and show my works in and on film.Read More »

Thomas Bernhard’s “Die Jagdgesellschaft”
Directed by Claus Peymann
Recorded in 1974 at Burgtheater Vienna

The bark-beetle has invaded the big forest of the general, just as a fatal illness has into the body of its owner. The general is suffering from eye cataract, preventing him from seeing the symptoms of the trees’ decline, just as he is unable to see his own rottening. His wife and the writer discuss these circumstances for two scenes, until the general discovers the fact himself in the third one. Now he is going to take appropriate action.
“The actors this evening were of peerless mastery. It’s impossible to imagine a better realization of this piece!” Frankfurter Allgemeine NewspaperRead More »

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Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.Read More »

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Bonello seized on the idea of making a cinematic tribute to Ingrid Caven when he first heard her sing at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, but the portrait he eventually made finds her exploring a more expansive range of performance styles and moods. A former member of R.W. Fassbinder’s cinematic troupe—the two were married for a brief stretch in the 1970s—and the ostensible subject of a fictional biography by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Caven spends Bonello’s movie singing a rich repertoire of songs, some of them traditional ballads, others non-verbal, and still others verging on abstract performance art. Ingrid Caven: Music and Voice is a showcase for a truly sui generis musician—a sort of cabaret singer for the 21st century—and a respectful tribute to one artist from another.Read More »

Memoirs of the Italian Opera by the singers and musicians of the Casa Verdi, Milan, the world’s first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. This documentary, which has achieved cult-like status among opera and music lovers, features former singers who reminisce about their careers and their past operatic roles.
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Arthur and Marcel, two firemen, keep boredom at bay by improvising on stage, one on a keyboard the other on drums, tunes, poems and songs. Carol arrives, in search of her lover Armand. Accompanied by the musicians, she sings of her strange loves and leaves. Then Armand turns up, in search of Carol, and the disturbing Cigare…Read More »

Plot Synopsis
With characteristic invention, Ariane Mnouchkine, one of Europe’s most visionary stage directors, had the actors of Le Théâtre du Soleil improvise refugee stories based on what they’d gathered in a lifetime of newspaper reading before showing them the extraordinary letters on which THE LAST CARAVANSERAIL is based. Selected letters – written by Iranian, and Kurdish refugees held in France, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand – were then organized into an episodic, non-linear, structure that honors and recalls Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, manifold tales of war, no matter its cause, and its consequences. The 6-hour play, presented in two parts, neither points its finger at the West nor portrays the refugees as saintly; what it does is give dimension to withering statistics.Read More »

Eric Rohmer’s mostly faithful staging of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Käthchen von Heilbronn. It was taped in 1979 at the Theatre des Amandiers, Nanterre for broadcast on French TV. After Die Marquise von O…, this is Rohmer’s second Kleist adaptation, and it features a lot of familiar faces in the Rohmersphere.Read More »

On a beautiful June weekend in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, the Monterey International Pop Festival roared forward, capturing a decade’s spirit and ushering in a new era of rock and roll. Monterey featured career-making performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, but they were just a few of the performers in a wildly diverse lineup that also included Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Who, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, and the extraordinary Ravi Shankar. With his characteristic vérité style—and a camera crew that included the likes of Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock—D. A. Pennebaker captured it all, immortalizing moments that have become legend: Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, Jimi Hendrix burning his, Mama Cass watching Janis Joplin’s performance in awe. The most comprehensive document of the Monterey Pop Festival ever produced features the film Monterey Pop along with every available complete performance filmed by Pennebaker and his crew, along with additional rare outtakes and supplements.Read More »