“Michael Smith is a big baby. Well, not all the time. But when he gets into his droopy diapers and lacy bonnet, adds sunglasses and a pacifier, and totters around on his stumpy legs as Baby Ikki, he’s as riveting to watch as any real toddler, albeit larger, hairier and a bit scary. Mr. Smith, the multitalented performer, video maker and multimedia artist, has been doing this character for about 30 years, and it never gets old.

For his latest escapade Baby Ikki went to Burning Man, the weeklong celebration of all things psychedelic that takes place every summer in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A film crew followed him as he wandered around the festival in white Crocs, and the resulting footage is the heartbeat of “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” a wonderfully entertaining and slyly thought-provoking collaboration between Mr. Smith and Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles artist known for, among other things, sculptures made of old, grubby stuffed animals and children’s blankets.

Occupying the SculptureCenter’s main space, the installation features a half-dozen large flat screens showing various phases of Baby Ikki’s day and night peregrinations, which cumulatively add up to an odyssey. In the gallery is a set of tubular metal structures resembling children’s playground climbing equipment, which includes one shaped like a rocket and a geodesic dome skeleton whose floor is covered with stuffed animals. This emphasizes a view of Burning Man as an essentially juvenile gathering. The boyish optimism of Modernist futurism — as in the inventions of Buckminster Fuller — is evoked by these jungle gymlike sculptures.

Looming over all is a colossal sculpture of Baby Ikki made of welded-together junk metal, which parodies the towering wooden sculpture with the emblematic figure that is climactically set on fire every year at Burning Man.

The videos start with Baby Ikki playing in the motor home that brought him to the event. Evidently preoccupied by fire, he clicks on a cigarette lighter, turns on the gas-fired stove top and consumes candy fireballs while horror-movie scenes of a woman threatened by flames plays on a television.

Outside he ambulates among campers dressed in all kinds of fanciful costumes, gesturing with clumsily splayed fingers at people and objects of interest. Occasionally he belts vehicles — done up like animals for a parade — with the stuffed green creature he carries around in one arm. All the while he maintains an expression of melancholic, slightly quizzical impassivity.

When night comes, he visits some of the elaborate, walk-in environments created by various campers and observes people dancing, twirling flaming batons and otherwise expressing themselves. At one point three minimally dressed women pull him onstage and writhe around him like lap dancers. Finally, all tuckered out, he finds a cushion-covered floor and falls asleep.

Baby Ikki seems to fit right in amid all the zanily attired burners, but he’s not one of them. He’s a kind of mole, a secret agent with his own agenda. Clearly Mr. Smith and Mr. Kelley designed their project not to celebrate but to mock the Burning Man circus. To substitute a giant baby for its wooden avatar is to suggest that the festival is driven by infantilism.

Contrary to the old hippie fantasy that expanding consciousness through unbridled fun, creativity and hedonism — and of course psychotropic drugs — will transform the world for the better, they imply that Burning Man is naïve and disingenuously complicit with capitalist consumerism. It becomes a symbol of what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation,” which reroutes unruly and rebellious instinctual energies into politically harmless sybaritic indulgence, escapist entertainment and spiritual delusion.

There have been times when anarchic revelry seemed like a good way to resist and overturn socially limiting mores. The antics of the Dadaists in the 1920s and the high jinks of the Merry Pranksters in the ’60s were, perhaps, genuinely liberating. But now that Dionysian catharsis has become the promise of beer commercials and spring-break debauchery, behaving “wildly” is no longer so threatening to the status quo.

This does not make the Smith-Kelley project antipsychedelic. A politics of paranoia that finds everywhere the surreptitious, systematic curbing of individual freedoms and democratic initiative has always been part of the counterculture psyche. Yet this sort of suspicious mind-set can be diverted into less troublesome endeavors like “institutional critique,” the academically certified type of conceptualism that views art museums as agents of consciousness control and puts its faith in the analytic powers of the properly trained intellect.

The Smith-Kelley project is an unusually imaginative and funny instance of “institutional critique,” assuming it is fair to call Burning Man an institution. Admittedly, satirizing the festival and its associated New Age culture is like shooting fish in a barrel. (Borat could have a field day there.) But there are moments in the videos of considerable metaphorical and emotional urgency, as when we see Baby Ikki alone in the distance, almost lost in a dust storm, or when he falls asleep and dreams of women’s breasts.

In the Fellini-like scene with the three dancers, he’s like Odysseus enduring the call of the sirens. It’s less the tendentious didacticism than the comic, mythological vision that makes it compelling.

But the tension between ideological critique and carnivalesque rebellion — a schism that has been running through American radicalism for over a century — is something to think about too. A choice between purity of spirit and exuberance of soul.”

Director: Mike Kelley, Michael Smith
Writers: Mike Kelley, Michael Smith
Cast: Michael Smith
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 26mn

Voyage Of Growth And Discovery (Mike Kelley And Michael Smith 2009).mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 26 min
Size: 	1.25 GiB
Video
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https://nitro.download/view/F026C5B1F2AA758/Voyage_Of_Growth_And_Discovery_(Mike_Kelley_And_Michael_Smith_2009).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Kelley and Michael Smith – A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Portrait of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature.

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“The very thing that brought the thing to be is the thing that will cause its death,” Goldsworthy explains, as his elegant, spiraled constructions once again become random piles of stones on the beach. As with Andy’s stones, so with our lives.

“Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time” is a documentary that opened in San Francisco in mid-2002 and just kept running, moving from one theater to another, finding its audience not so much through word of mouth as through hand on elbow, as friends steered friends into the theater, telling them that this was a movie they had to see. I started getting e-mails about it months ago. Had I seen it? I hadn’t even heard of it.

It is a film about a man wholly absorbed in the moment. He wanders woods and riverbanks, finding materials and playing with them, fitting them together, piling them up, weaving them, creating beautiful arrangements that he photographs before they return to chaos. He knows that you can warm the end of an icicle just enough to make it start to melt, and then hold it against another icicle, and it will stick. With that knowledge, he makes an ice sculpture, and then it melts in the sun and is over.

Some of his constructions are of magical beauty, as if left behind by beings who disappeared before the dawn. He finds a way to arrange twigs in a kind of web. He makes a spiral of rocks that fans out from a small base and then closes in again, a weight on top holding it together. This is not easy, and he gives us pointers: “Top control can be the death of a work.” Often Andy will be … almost there … right on the edge … holding his breath as one last piece goes into place … and then the whole construction will collapse, and he will look deflated, defeated, for a moment (“Damn!”), and then start again: “When I build something, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that’s a very beautiful balance.” His art needs no explanation. We go into modern art galleries and find work we cannot comprehend as art. We see Damien Hurst’s sheep, cut down the middle and embedded in plastic, and we cannot understand how it won the Turner Prize (forgetting that no one thought Turner was making art, either). We suppose that Concepts and Statements are involved.

But with Andy Goldsworthy, not one word of explanation is necessary, because every single one of us has made something like his art. We have piled stones or made architectural constructions out of sand, or played Pick-Up Stix, and we know exactly what he is trying to do–and why. Yes, why, because his art takes him into that Zone where time drops away and we forget our left-brain concerns and are utterly absorbed by whether this … could go like this … without the whole thing falling apart.

The documentary, directed, photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, a German filmmaker, goes home with Goldsworthy to Penpont, Scotland, where we see him spending some time with his wife and kids. It follows him to a museum in the South of France, and to an old stone wall in Canada that he wants to rebuild in his own way. It visits with him old stone markers high in mountains, built by early travelers to mark the path.

And it offers extraordinary beauty. We watch as he smashes stones to release their cyan content and uses that bright-red dye to make spectacular patterns in the currents and whirlpools of streams. We see a long rope of linked leaves, bright green, uncoil as it floats downstream. Before, we saw only the surface of the water, but now the movement of the leaves reveals its current and structure. What a happy man. Watching this movie is like daydreaming.

Director: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Writers: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Cast: Andy Goldsworthy, Anna Goldsworthy, Holly Goldsworthy
Producer: Leslie Hills, Trevor Davies, Annedore von Donop
Cinematography: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Music: Fred Frith
Production Company: YLE, Mediopolis Film- und Fernsehproduktion, Skyline Productions, WDR
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 30mn

Rivers and Tides (2001).mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 30 min
Size: 	2.69 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
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https://nitro.download/view/71386EEC4B65B92/Rivers_and_Tides_(2001).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

Many thanks to @Gene for this copy

The post Thomas Riedelsheimer – Rivers and Tides (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

New York City, 1985. Prior Walter announces to his boyfriend Louis Ironson that he has been diagnosed with AIDS. Unable to cope with this, Louis leaves. This abandonment leaves Prior shattered. At the same time, Roy Cohn, a powerful lawyer and a right-wing political conservative is diagnosed with AIDS but demands that his doctor say that he has liver cancer as he does not want his homosexuality known in the circles he moves in. Cohn grooms his assistant, the milquetoast Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt, to go to Washington in order to protect him from a disbarment trial. At the same time Joe’s wife Harper has become deeply unhappy and addicted to valium over the fact that Joe does not seem to want her sexually. Joe finally comes out and admits that he is fighting homosexual desires. When he calls to tell his mother that he is gay, she sells up everything she has in Salt Lake City and rushes to New York to help, but Joe has vanished – in fact has met and taken up with Louis. As he becomes increasingly more ill, Prior receives visitations from a female angel who has sex with him and then implants a holy book inside his body, telling him that he is a prophet and must sound the warning that human progress be stopped. And as Cohn falls ill in hospital, the ghost of the Communist spy Ethel Rosenberg, whom he helped convict and execute, comes to gloat at his nearing death.

The play/mini-series is largely designed to confront modern American attitudes towards homosexuality and the reactions to the AIDS scare during its first appearance. All of the characters have been designed to reflect some facet of this – from drag and flamboyant camp to the closeted man struggling within the social expectations of a marriage and of course the conservative religious reaction. The most fascinating of these is the character of lawyer Roy Cohn played by Al Pacino. What many do not realize is that Roy Cohn was a real figure, who was active in the Communist witch hunts conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s, where he was McCarthy’s chief legal council and most famously headed that the trial that tried and executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1953 for supposedly passing classified information to the Soviets. The fascinating fact about Roy Cohn was that he was also gay and died of AIDS in 1986, although vehemently denied that he was gay or infected right up until his death. Moreover Cohn also quite hypocritically supported ardent right wing issues and the prosecution of many others for being gay. At the end of the mini-series, Tony Kushner finally reaches an almost Utopian vision of harmony and hope for the future. The final scene has all the remaining characters directly addressing the camera and Justin Kirk offering what is clearly a manifesto upon Kushner’s part: “This disease [AIDS] will be the end of many of us. But not nearly all of us … And we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths any more. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens when the time has come.”

Director: Mike Nichols
Writers: Tony Kushner
Cast: Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson,
Producer: Paul A. Levin, Celia D. Costas
Cinematography: Stephen Goldblatt
Music: Thomas Newman
Production Company: HBO, Films Avenue Pictures, Avenue Entertainment
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 00mn

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https://nitro.download/view/553CA5101EF4CBB/Angels_In_America_-_Part_6.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Mike Nichols – Angels in America (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Written by the Liverpool socialist, Jimmy McGovern, Sunday tells the story of the events of January 30th, 1972 when British Paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians, and wounded a further 15, during an illegal civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. The day which went on to become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.

The film was commissioned by Channel 4 to be shown on the 30th anniversary of the shootings. In preparation for the film an extensive and wide ranging research interviews were carried out amongst both the families affected by the tragedy and the British paratroopers who fired the bullets. In total more than 100 first hand interviews were recorded, and it is on the basis of that work that Jimmy McGovern wrote his script.

It tells its story through the eyes and emotions of the families of the victims and, more widely, of the Bogside community and then goes on to examine the political conext for ‘Bloody Sunday’, as well as the impact of the first official Government Inquiry into the day itself, conducted by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, in 1972.

On broadcast the film faced a barrage of criticism from a variety of commentators. The film was one-sided, ran the refrain, depicting the paratroopers as heartless killers, and all of the dead and wounded as innocent victims. And why, they asked, the continuing concentration on Bloody Sunday, when nobody’s made a movie about other atrocities, in some of which just as many people died at the hands of republican or loyalist paramilitaries?

McGovern answers that what drew him to the subject were precisely the things which made Bloody Sunday different, and which gave the day a pivotal significance in the politics of Britain and Ireland. Bloody Sunday wasn’t perpetrated by furtive guerrillas lying in wait on a lonely road in the dead of night, but by uniformed agents of the British State in a built-up area on a bright winter’s afternoon, witnessed by hundreds who had fled from the hailstorm of bullets into houses and high-rise flats all around. People in the Bogside didn’t demand a public inquiry afterward because they wanted to find out the truth but because, knowing the truth, they wanted it acknowledged.

It was because it wasn’t acknowledged, because the truth was whitewashed out of history, the victims demonized and the killers lauded, that young people in Catholic working-class communities across the North saw themselves facing a choice between giving up the fight for equal rights or finding guns and fighting back. The film accurately depicts the mushroom growth of the IRA beginning before the sweet stench of cordite had cleared from lower Rossville Street.

The strength of McGovern’s film lies in the way it shows that the killings hadn’t resulted from accident or misunderstanding or because psyched-up soldiers ran amok. The British commander of land forces in the North, Robert Ford, had laid out his intentions in a memo to the general officer commanding three weeks before the slaughter, on Jan. 7, 1972: “I am coming to the conclusion . . . that we must shoot selected ringleaders of the Bogside young hooligans.” McGovern puts Ford on screen dictating the memo, then shows him on the ground on the day urging the paras to “Go on . . . go and get them.”

McGovern shows the source of the evil which burst on the Bogside located in the conscious intentions of the British political, military and legal elite, when he depicts Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath steering Lord Chief Justice Widgery (appointed just two days after the event to conduct a public inquiry) toward the conclusion the British establishment wanted drawn.

Despite all this, the script transcends personal loss and communal grief to tap into the trauma of those who are oppressed and murdered everywhere because seen as enemies of the State. The dilemma presented isn’t that of a hero emoting on behalf of the people, but of the plain people themselves torn between a thirst for justice and an instinct for revenge.

Director: Charles McDougall, Jimmy McGovern
Writers: Jimmy McGovern
Cast: Ciarán McMenamin, Barry Mullan, Paul Campbell
Producer: Gub Neal, Stephen Gargan, Catriona McKenzie
Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd
Music: Adrian Johnston
Production Company: Sunday Productions, Channel 4 Television
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 34mn

Sunday.2002.DVDRip.x264.mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 31 min
Size: 	1.24 GiB
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Codec: 	x264
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#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 161 kb/s (Commentary with writer Jimmy McGovern, director Charles McDougall and producer Stephen Gargan)

https://nitro.download/view/76F3BAFC12F4C6E/Sunday.2002.DVDRip.x264.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/D2CB0C39C1C229F/Sunday.-.The.Debate.2002.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English SDH

The post Charles McDougall & Jimmy McGovern – Sunday (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Following an ad in the paper, Ilze leaves her native village to become an actress. She fails the audition, but her pride won’t let her to return home. Her boyfriend is skeptical about her ambitions, he comes after her to bring her back home. The plot evolves around their relationship as they pretend and lie to each other trying to deal with emotional dissonance.

Director: Juris Poskus
Writers: Juris Poskus
Cast: Iveta Pole, Varis Pinkis, Madara Melberga
Producer: Juris Poškus, Laima Freimane, Guntars Laucis, Madara Melberga
Cinematography: Andrejs Rudzāts
Music: Ernests Ansons
Production Company: FA Filma, Latvijas Nacionalais Kino Centrs, Latvijas Televizija
Country: Latvia
Language: Latvian
Runtime: 1h 30mn

	
Monotonija 2007.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 33 min
Size: 	2.65 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
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https://nitro.download/view/CA2A43F97D406E3/Monotonija_2007.mkv

Language(s):Latvian
Subtitles:None

The post Juris Poskus – Monotonija (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Modern western detailing the drama of a man struggling to hold on to his ranch and struggling to raise a granddaughter he never knew.

Director: Matthew Marconi
Writers: Matthew Marconi
Cast: Buck Taylor,Samantha Droke,Michaela Lange
Producer: Matthew Marconi, Keri Bruno, Dennis Trombly
Cinematography: Takuji Murata
Music: Robert Gulya
Production Company: Top Knot Productions
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 1h 46mn

Truce.2005.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Runtime:	1h 46mn
Size:	2.22 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
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Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 491 kb/s
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#1:	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 384 kb/s
#2:	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 96.0 kb/s (Commentary with Director Matthew Marconi)

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https://rapidgator.net/file/c6a4da784950efa47e234cd098de683e/Truce.2005.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Matthew Marconi – Truce (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Producing Adults (Finnish: Lapsia ja aikuisia – kuinka niitä tehdään?) (Children and Adults – How To Make Them?) is a 2004 Finnish comedy-drama written by Pekko Pesonen and directed by Aleksi Salmenperä. It was Finland’s official Academy Award submission for Best Foreign Language Film of 2004

Longtime couple Venla and Antero come to a serious impasse. After years with Antero, Venla wants to start a family, but her boyfriend, worried that parenthood will stifle his speed-skating career, secretly gets a vasectomy. Determined to have a child, Venla seeks help from a female fertility doctor, a decision that breeds new possibilities for the prospective mother when she falls in love with the doctor.

Lapsia.ja.Aikuisia.2004.DVDRip.x264.AC3-t0ma5.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 35 min
Size: 	1.39 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	704x432 ~> 1015x432
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 586 kb/s
BPP: 	0.209
Audio
#1:  	5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s (Surround)

https://nitro.download/view/1DE41CCE7F0D198/Lapsia.ja.Aikuisia.2004.DVDRip.x264.AC3-t0ma5.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/a840b4e34e0ed1d1c01ed6aaa0b8240d/Lapsia.ja.Aikuisia.2004.DVDRip.x264.AC3-t0ma5.mkv

Language(s):Finnish
Subtitles:English, Swedish, Finnish, French, German

The post Aleksi Salmenperä – Lapsia ja aikuisia – Kuinka niitä tehdään? AKA Producing Adults (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.