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The boundary-breaking composer and performer Meredith Monk overcame a hostile critical establishment to become one of the great innovators of her generation. Now, Monk faces mortality: can such singular work be performed without her?Read More »
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An unsung talent in her lifetime, director, professor and Fulbright scholar Nietzchka Keene’s stark, stunning debut feature The Juniper Tree is loosely based on a Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, and stars Björk in her first on-screen performance. The film premiered to glowing reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 and led Keene to further direct Heroine of Hell (1996) starring Catherine Keener and Barefoot to Jerusalem (2008), the latter completed after her tragically early death in 2004.Read More »
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The documentary feature ARAKIMENTARI explores the work of popular and controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a style designed to match Araki’s own. Araki’s fame and the debate around his photography derive mostly from his work with nudes, which blur the lines normally established between art, erotica, and pornography. The photographs have often been credited with reversing the Japanese ban on the visual representation of pubic hair, and Araki has been seen by his supporters as one of the artistic champions of free speech and social criticism in Japan. Some of Araki’s celebrity fans–Bjork, Takeshi Kitano, Richard Kern and others–are interviewed to explain the appeal and importance of his photography. Liberally peppered with images of the photography and presented in a manner designed to imitate the combination of titillation and estrangement Araki’s work engenders, ARAKIMENTARI goes beyond the biographical documentary to the realm of artistic portrait.Read More »
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This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand And One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality.
There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales.
Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know.Read More »
Here we have a true rarity, an Icelandic WIP exploitation horror love story. Teenage girl (played by the singer Björk at the time when she was on the brink of becoming a world famous musician) is taken against her will from her dysfunctional home by the authorities and moved to an isolated and strict religious institution in the countryside where she and other girls at her age are kept imprisoned and harassed sexually. The film is loosely inspired by a true case involving the Salvation Army that became very controversial in the country two decades earlier. The film score is by Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, the current Chieftain of the Asa Faith Society in Iceland.Read More »
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Drawing Restraint 9, a film by Matthew Barney with a soundtrack composed by Björk, represents the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.
It is an apt pairing. Refusing to choose between pop pleasure and restless experimentation, Björk’s musical vision weds technology and emotion, countering gut-level expression with an insistence upon formal modernity and innovation.Read More »