Brakhage (1998)
Genre : Documentary
Runtime : 1H 15M
Director : Jim Shedden
Synopsis
BRAKHAGE explores the depth and breadth of the filmmaker’s genius, the exquisite splendor of his films, his magic personal charm, his aesthetic fellow travelers, and the influence his work has had on generations of other creators. While touching on significant moments in Brakhage’s biography, the film celebrates Brakhage’s visionary genius, and explores the extraordinary artistic possibilities of cinema, a medium mostly known only for its commercial applications in the form of narratives, cartoons, documentaries, and advertising. BRAKHAGE combines excerpts from Brakhage’s films and films of other avant-garde filmmakers (eg, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Willie Varela, Bruce Elder, and others); interviews with Brakhage, his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; archival footage of Brakhage spanning the past thirty-five years; and location shooting in Boulder, Colorado and New York.
Filmmakers discuss the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (“Le cinéma selon Hitchcock”), written by François Truffaut and published in 1966.
Alternately hilarious and horrifying, Overnight chronicles one man's misadventures of making a Hollywood movie. It starts out as a rags to riches story as Troy Duffy, a Boston-bred bartender, sells his first screenplay for The Boondock Saints.
In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.
A documentary about the production of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and the people who made it.
An exploration of the appeal of horror films, with interviews of many legendary directors in the genre.
While shooting a documentary on the suspicious disappearances within the homeless community, a filmmaker and his crew go missing while uncovering a terrifying and vicious secret below the city's surface.
A struggling filmmaker senses her peers are losing faith in her ability to succeed, so she decides to prove herself by finishing her last abandoned film and committing the perfect murder.
Documentary following the history of America's first cinematographers.
Everyone has a skeleton or two in his or her closet, but what about the director behind some of the most successful thrillers ever to hit the silver screen? Could M. Night Shyamalan be hiding a deep, dark secret that drives his macabre cinematic vision? Now viewers will be able to find out firsthand what fuels The Sixth Sense director's seemingly supernatural creativity as filmmakers interview Shyamalan as well as the cast and crew members who have worked most closely with him over the years. Discover the early events that shaped the mind of a future master of suspense in a documentary that is as fascinating as it is revealing.
A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.
A young couple ventures into the woods to capture footage of the elusive Bigfoot.
The evolution of adult cinema through the most influential films in history, a journey that begins in the 1970s and ends nowadays. An in-depth analysis of the success of the most prestigious erotic films, their impact on industry and society, and their influence on cinema and contemporary culture.
While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.
Bruce Lee is universally recognized as the pioneer who elevated martial arts in film to an art form, and this documentary will reveal why Bruce Lee's flame burns brighter now than the day he died over three decades ago. The greatest martial artists, athletes, actors, directors, and producers in the entertainment business today will share their feelings about the one who started it all. We will interview the people whose lives, careers, and belief systems were forever altered by the legendary "Father of Martial Arts Cinema". Rarely seen archival footage and classic photos will punctuate the personal testimonials. Prepare to be inspired.
Capturing Avatar is a feature length behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Avatar. It uses footage from the film's development, as well as stock footage from as far back as the production of Titanic in 1995. Also included are numerous interviews with cast, artists, and other crew members. The documentary was released as a bonus feature on the extended collector's edition of Avatar.
A documentary directed by Winding Refn's wife, Liv Corfixen, and it follows the Danish-born filmmaker during the making of his 2013 film Only God Forgives.
FaZe Rug moves into a new home, unaware of the creepy clowns who live next door.
Rob Grant and Mike Kovac receive a disturbing fan video inspired by their previous horror movie Mon Ami, motivating them to investigate the responsibility of filmmakers in portraying violence in movies. In their pursuit of the truth they are unwittingly introduced to the real world of violent criminals and their victims.
A young man recruits a film student to help him prove the existence of an urban legend.
Max Spencer, a YouTube celebrity psychologist, host of the show ‘Psychology-Inside/Out’, sets himself the challenge of getting an intensely agoraphobic woman to leave her home in just ten days. However, as the minutes, hours and seconds count down, a creepy local legend about the black magic practicing Green Eyes that holds the town in it's grip, starts to become a horrifying reality... Combining the best elements of the cursed found footage genre with spellbinding pagan visuals, this is something of a dark fairytale for adults. Starring FrightFest favourites, presenter Emily Booth and HELLRAISER’s Nicholas Vince.
A documentary about the making of The Turin Horse, the last film directed by Hungarian master Béla Tarr.
In a 13-minute navigation, Nestler takes us downstream the Rhine River. The opportunity of cheap water transport kept prices of raw material down and made the Rhine one of the most important arteries of industrial transport in the world.
In Rembrandt, Haanstra shows that it is possible to make a fascinating film only with images from paintings. He had to travel though all over Europe to numerous museums and private owners in order to film the works of art. In the work of the great painter, Haanstra recognizes his particular interest in man as an individual human being, cutting straight through all the religious motives. And Haanstra also wants to see Rembrandt as an individual.
The film is set over the course of a New Year's Eve night in the Croatian port city of Split, where it follows three parallel plots. The first plot line features a small-time drug dealer Nike (Marinko Prga) and a young widow Marija (Nives Ivankovic); the second plot line deals with a drug addict called Maja (Marija Skaricic) who decides to have sex with an US Navy sailor called Franky (Coolio) in exchange for some heroin; the third one shows a young couple, Luka and Andela (Vicko Bilandzic and Ivana Roscic) who spend the night desperately looking for a place to celebrate the New Year by having their first sexual experience. The plots are connected through Dino Dvornik's concert, where all of them pass through at some point, and through the omnipresent fireworks that dot the night sky over the course of the film.
Three wordless rituals: birth, between, and rebirth. A woman lies at the bottom of a swimming pool, alone. The camera pans her body. She starts to rise, then sinks; convulsions follow and then she rises and hovers above the pool. A shirtless man in white pants stands in an asphalt lot, a car visible on either side. Convulsions begin. The cars back up, still facing him and each other. They pause; they race toward him. He leaps. A youth, shirtless and in white shorts, stands in front of a tall building. Doors open, he enters and walks to an elevator. Convulsions strike him as he rides to a top floor, exits the elevator, pauses, and runs toward a window. He crashes through.
This film is about the relationship of a mother and her daughter, the split-up of their family, the blessing and curse of belonging together and about coming of age - all this from the perspective of the young girl Aglaja. The story is based on real-life events, an Eastern European circus artist family that fled to the West. If they want to stay in the circus business they have to make up an exotic act. The mother spends all their money to buy a very dangerous act: hanging by her hair high up in the dome of the circus while juggling with burning torches. Every night Aglaja is terrified by the fear of losing her mother. But, on some day, she has to follow the family tradition and become the "Woman with the Hair of Steel".
July ’71 is as much a record of the daily experiences of light and shadow as it is a catalogue of domestic life. More involved with “straight photography” than Brakhage, but far more engaged with tactility and the plastics of the image than Jonas Mekas, this early work embraces the mundane—making bread in the kitchen, riding bikes by the San Francisco Bay, hanging out in a cheap-looking flat with friends, plucking a game fowl for supper—while also paying attention to the wind, water, and trees that surround these fleeting moments.
On Christmas Eve, Léa and Juliette, a couple, want to rob a supermarket that Juliette knows is empty of surveillance on this festive evening. But, as much for each of them as for Eric, the vigil who is there after all, nothing will happen as planned. Besides, shortly before leaving him alone, the store manager gave Eric a gun, just in case.
How does art survive in a time of oppression? During the Soviet rule artists who stay true to their vision are executed, sent to mental hospitals or Gulags. Their plight inspires young Igor Savitsky. He pretends to buy state-approved art but instead daringly rescues 40,000 forbidden fellow artist's works and creates a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. Though a penniless artist himself, he cajoles the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who are banning it. Savitsky amasses an eclectic mix of Russian Avant-Garde art. But his greatest discovery is an unknown school of artists who settle in Uzbekistan after the Russian revolution of 1917, encountering a unique Islamic culture, as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin. They develop a startlingly original style, fusing European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.
Maarten, a 34 year old cell biologist, works on cloning. One night he dreams he has only seven days left to live.
Hutton's most impressive work ... the filmmaker's style takes on an assertive edge that marks his maturity. The landscape has a majesty that serves to reflect the meditative interiority of the artist independent of any human presence. ... New York is framed in the dark nights of a lonely winter. The pulse of street life finds no role in NEW YORK PORTRAIT; the dense metropolitan population and imposing urban locale disappear before Hutton's concern for the primal force of a universal presence. With an eye for the ordinary, Hutton can point his camera toward the clouds finding flocks of birds, or turn back to the simple objects around his apartment struggling to elicit a personal intuition from their presence. ... Hutton finds a harmonious, if at times melancholy, rapport with the natural elements that retain their grace in spite of the city's artificial environment. The city becomes a ghost town that the filmmaker transforms into a vehicle reflecting his personal mood.
A film documenting the landscapes of northern Iceland, as well as a recent work about the Hudson River.
In 1950, when a young communist director arrives to take charge of a stud farm, his efforts to draw on the experience of the old hands there meet with little success. Indeed, so outraged are they at the changeover to communism that they harass him at every turn, especially after he treats a local barmaid as if she were a whore of some kind. After administering a beating to him, the old hands are nonetheless incensed when he calls on the police. The director doesn't get enough help, however, because the stable hands stab him before running off for the border.
The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.
As if we were in a small town. An ordinary day in a kid’s life. An incredibly hot day. Here everything is unique. One gang. One game. One field. One girl. In the span of one day, how can this boy arrive at such a changing point in his life from which there is no return?
BOSTON FIRE finds grandeur in smoke rising eloquently from a city blaze. Billowing puffs of darkness blend with fountains of water streaming in from offscreen to orchestrate a play of primal elements. The beautiful texture of the smoke coupled with the isolation from the source of the fire erases the destructive impact of the event. The camera, lost in the immense dark clouds, produces images for meditation removed from the causes or consequences of the scene. The tiny firemen, seen as distant silhouettes, gaze in awe, helpless before nature’s power.
A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.
HBO Hungary looks at the popularity of Pierre Woodman, a French porn director known for his amateur "casting" shoots and contract work with Private and Hustler. Woodman prowls the malls and cafés of Eastern Europe seeking attractive, persuadable 19-year-olds to film in his hotel room.
Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a draught. And Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy world I will let down the net.
A wife, tired of her husband's non-stop carousing, sues him for divorce. The judge, however, comes up with a novel solution--he makes the husband take his wife's place in the household--including dressing like her--for 30 days to see what it's like to be his wife.