In continuo
★ 6.8 · 1971 · 11m · Documentary
"In continuo" uses slaughterhouse imagery to present the warlike nature of man, first depicting the cleaning and mechanical preparations for the slaughterhouse and then the killing, however, the animal slaughter itself isn’t shown.
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Fresno
2014 · ★ 6
A film of and through the trees. Leaves catch, consume and resist the light through the seasons.
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The Afterlife
2023
A young adult's first-hand account of "accidentally becoming human again" after, and with, trauma induced depression. Lo-fi, vulnerable, and uniquely youthful, "The Afterlife" is a melancholic affirmation of life after death.
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Frank Zappa: A Token Of His Extreme
2013 · ★ 6.1
Frank Zappa: A Token of his Extreme is the 1974 television special recorded at Kcet in Hollywood that was produced by Zappa and aired only in France and Switzerland. The program, as thoroughly tweezed and produced by Zappa for his own Honker Home Video label, includes the following musical performances by Zappa and his band: T”he Dog Breath Variations/ Uncle Meat,” “Montana,” “Florentine Pogen,” “Stink-Foot,” “Pygmy Twylyte,” “Room Service,” “Inca Roads,” “Oh No,” Son of Orange County,” “More Trouble Every Day” and “A Token of My Extreme.” In the words of Zappa himself as he said it on The Mike Douglas Show in 1976, “This is put together with my own money and my own time and it’s been offered to television networks and to syndication and it has been steadfastly rejected by the American television industry.
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Listening to the Space in My Room
2013 · ★ 8.5
A portrait of a recently vacated home, the film evokes both memory and the lingering presence of past inhabitants. Through precise, enigmatic sound–image construction, Beavers crafts an intimate meditation on art, existence, and the search for meaning.
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Safari
2016 · ★ 6.5
Africa. In the wild expanses, where bush-bucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.
More info →Rheinmetall/Victoria 8
2003
An avant-garde meditation on obsolete technology. The film is of a 1930s Rheinmetall typewriter owned by the director. The film itself is projected by a 1960s-era Victoria 8 projector. This exhibit was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.
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Rouge ! L'Art au pays des soviets
2019 · ★ 7.8
In the Russian Empire of the 1910s, a group of visionary painters revolutionized the aesthetic norms of their time and opted for radical abstraction. In the years between the seizure of power by the Russian Bolsheviks and Stalinism in the 1930s, the avant-gardists developed a new form of art that ushered in modernism.
More info →Play Dead: Real Time
2003
An avant-garde film presented as part of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. From MoMA's catalog: "For the monumental installation Play Dead; Real Time, (director Douglas) Gordon arranged for a circus elephant to be transported to Gagosian Gallery, in New York City, where he filmed it obeying a series of commands (repeatedly lying down and then awkwardly struggling to rise). Like many of Gordon's protagonists, the elephant is subject to greater forces, beyond its controL Simultaneously presenting several different versions of the scene, in front and rear projections and on a monitor, the work depicts the event from a range of perspectives rather than from a single static viewpoint."
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Romantic Warriors IV: Krautrock (Part I)
2019
The fourth in a series of feature-length documentaries about Progressive rock written and directed by Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder. Krautrock, Part 1 focuses on German progressive rock, popularly known as Krautrock, from in and around the Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg regions of Germany. Artist featured include Kraftwerk, Neu, Can, Faust and others.
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The Light Penetrates the Dark
1931 · ★ 5.7
Zdenek Pešánek created the first public kinetic sculpture, for the power station in Prague. This short experimental film focuses on a kinetic sculpture by Zdenek Pešánek. For a period of eight years it issued beams of light from the outside wall of a transformer station at Prague’s power utility before its destruction in 1939. Though genuine, these shots seem abstract to us. They are a rhythmically assembled ode to the light-creating devices and phenomena of electricity. Light arcs, coils, bulbs and various luminous elements support the alternation of positive and negative film images, creating an impressive universe of light and shade. In the 1920s, Pešánek had obtained financial support for his work with electric kinetic light art. In the 1930s, he was the first sculptor to use neon lights. He built several kinetic light pianos, and published a book titled “Kinetismus” in 1941. —http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org
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Frank Zappa: A Pioneer of the Future of Music
2007
Frank Scheffer's (collage like) documentary on the American composer and rock guitarist Frank Zappa, as broadcast by VPRO in the Netherlands April 22,2007. Most of what’s on here is seen before, particularly in Roelof Kier’s 1971 documentary and/or Scheffer’s own documentary “A present day composer refuses to die”. But there is some new stuff too, particularly interviews with Denny Walley, Haskell Wekler, Elliot Ingber and Bruce Fowler.
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