Stray Light
2011 · 12m · Documentary
A reflection on the iconic headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company in downtown Chicago. The eleven-story Modernist building on South Michigan Avenue was home to Jet and Ebony magazines since its design in 1971. The building was heralded as the first major downtown Chicago building designed by an African-American architect since the eighteenth century. In the case of the Johnson family and its legacy, Hartt looks to the intersection of the publisher’s ideals and values, the style and aesthetics embodied by the site and the lasting cultural impact of the magazines.
More Like This
The Flood
2021
The decision to move to Holland doesn't sound like a wise idea. Why move to a country that could be flooded at any moment? For the last 25 years, the political climate has shifted. The public debate on migration has become harsher, more heated, and polarized. What would have been considered right-wing xenophobia back then, is now considered mainstream. Populists simplify complex realities into good and evil, victims and perpetrators: ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Their rhetoric often consists of dehumanizing words and metaphors. One of these is ‘water’. In reality, water is not an immediate threat to the average Dutch person; but it is a huge threat to the thousands trying to reach the Netherlands. People trying to survive the Mediterranean Sea in rubber boats. Trying to survive winter on the Aegean coast in primitive tents. To them, water really is deadly.
More info →
Philippe-Alain Michaud, le réel traversé par la fiction
2016
To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.
More info →
The Genius of Leonardo Da Vinci
2018 · ★ 9
Janina Ramirez explores the BBC archives to create a TV history of Leonardo Da Vinci, discovering what lies beneath the Mona Lisa and even how he acquired his anatomical knowledge.
More info →
A New Spirit in Painting: 6 Painters of the 1980's
1984
Explores the paths being forged by six modern artists, giving us rare insight into the minds behind this rousing new wave of painting.
More info →
Darkroom Diaries
2024
In a high tech profession where photography is seemingly at everyone’s fingertips, Paul Hodgkinson steps back in time to create art using the same historical techniques as the pioneers of his craft.
More info →
Leonardo Da Vinci The Tragic Pursuit of Perfection
1953 · ★ 7
A portrait of the artist as a "sublime demon with the archangel's face", with an innovative musique concrète soundtrack.
More info →
Dieter Roth. Solo Scenes. 1997-98
1998
These 131 video monitors stacked in a grid present simultaneous, continuous footage of the German artist during the last year of his life. In this filmed diary-project that Dieter Roth executed while convalescing in Reykjavik and Basel, we see him not only working in his studio but also while he sleeps, bathes, and uses the bathroom. It is nearly impossible to pay attention to only one video without becoming distracted by an unexpected sound or movement coming from one of the many other screens. Each monitor broadcasts a different point in the artist's daily routine, while the gridlike arrangement of monitors reinforces a sense of order and chronology.
More info →
Michael Palin In Wyeth's World
2013 · ★ 7.8
Michael Palin heads for rural Pennsylvania and Maine to explore the extraordinary life and work of one of America's most popular and controversial painters, Andrew Wyeth. Fascinated by his iconic painting Christina's World, Palin goes in search of the real life stories that inspired this and Wyeth's other depictions of the American landscape and its hard grafting inhabitants. Tracking down the farmers, friends and family featured in Wyeth's magically real work, Palin builds a picture of an eccentric, enigmatic and driven painter. He also gets a rare interview with Helga, the woman who put Wyeth back in the headlines when the press discovered he had been painting her nude, compulsively but secretly for 15 years.
More info →
All this Roughness
2020
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.
More info →
The Big Wheel
1980
During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."
More info →
Persistencia
2016
In Antarctica, an artist prepares his installation simultaneously with a group of scientists conducting research. An essay on the persistence and loneliness of the creative act; like the flight of a butterfly in chaos theory or a silent prayer. A sensory experience. A visual poem made of ice, snow and wind.
More info →
Exergo
2024
Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.
More info →