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Unknown Role
A harrowing, gorgeous, in-your-face-and-mind 45-minute black-and-white film by Marty Topp, produced by Ira Cohen for Universal Mutant. “Marty Topp’s beautiful film of ‘Paradise Now’ reveals how the theories of revolutionary change and the experience of sexual liberation are not separate paths to the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Practiced together they are a single thrust, encompassing both political action and sensual joy, leading to the dreamed-of terrestrial paradise.
Eight drug addicts are waiting for their connection in a New York apartment while a two-man documentary team films the proceedings. Things go out of control as the men grow increasingly nervous and the cameraman keeps recording.
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
Jonas Mekas’s film captures The Living Theatre’s stage production of The Brig, an unflinching portrait of life inside a U.S. Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. Over the course of a single day, prisoners endure relentless drills, abuse, and dehumanization, exposing the brutality of military discipline with stark immediacy.
A professional recording of the official play. The play has a play-within-a-play format, with characters Jim Dunn as the "producer" and Jaybird as the "writer" attempting to stage a production about the underbelly of society using "real" addicts. Some of the addicts are jazz musicians. They all (except for the "producer", "writer", and two "photographers") have one thing in common: they are waiting for their drug dealer, their "connection". The dialogue of the characters is interspersed with jazz music.
a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)
The body of a Real Housewife is an apparatus, an assembly of parts—hair, lips, dress, falsies, mic pack, cell phone, wine stem, camera, restaurant, brand, identity. This body is maintained and degraded, intoxicated and cleansed, in seasons and cycles, systems of supply and denial. The self needs a medium. Who cares who you are when you’re alone anymore?
Commissioned work by Julian Beck and members of The Living Theatre (featuring Beck and Judith Malina, co-founders of The Living Theatre, in performance) for broadcast on KQED-TV, San Francisco. The Dilexi Series represents a pioneering effort to present works created by artists specifically for broadcast.
Jérôme Bel's show features the memories of spectators at the Avignon Festival.
At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressionist colouring 'injected' by electronic means, this emerges as a hypnotic transmutation of a theatrical event into poetic cinema, capturing the ambiance and frenzy of the original. No documentary record could have done it justice.
Shahd throws a party in her villa and invites many of her friends, everyone is surprised by strange things that starts happening, as Shahd locks them inside the villa to find out the woman who had an affair with her husband.
Unfortunate events beset a poor Chinese girl as she escapes from invading Japanese forces, narrowly avoids being raped, and seeks solace in a neighboring village.
In this drama, undercover investigators are recruited from the streets to prevent arms smugglers from getting their weapons to street gangs.
The mistress of an engineer meets the man's pregnant wife and decides to give up the liaison.
During the First World War, before joining a squadron at the front in 1918, Herbillon (Jean-Pierre Aumont) has a liaison with Helene (Annabella), a married woman. The young man discovers that his mistress is none other than the wife of Maury (Charles Vanel), an aviator friend.
In the forest, knight-errant Hans meets and falls in love with Ondine, a water-sprite who is attracted to the world of mortal man.
An ironic look at a climber who decides to do anything to get a job he thinks will launch him into a better career.
Archduke Alexander (Clive Brook) is better known for his sexual conquests than his diplomatic triumphs. After a lifetime of loving 'em and leaving 'em, the Archduke finally meets a girl he can't leave, Hungarian lass Judith Peredy (Billie Dove). She resists his advances but can't hide the fact that she's in love with him. The Yellow Lily was the second of four cinematic collaborations between star Billie Dove and director Alexander Korda.
Orson Welles reads the poem especially for this film by Larry Jordan, which is dedicated to the late Wallace Berman, and is made possible by a grant from The National Endowment Of The Arts.
Four very different women, best friends during high school many years earlier, gather in the small town where they grew up for a reunion as bridesmaids in preparation for a wedding for a fifth friend.
As a country arms itself for war, a family tears itself apart. Forced to avenge his father's death but paralyzed by the task ahead, Hamlet rages against the impossibility of his predicament, threatening both his sanity and the security of the state.
An improv group deals with several crises, including the loss of their lease and one member hitting the big time.
A woman embarks on a journey alone across the United States after fleeing from her violent husband.
Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein’s bewildered creature is cast out into a hostile universe by his horror-struck maker. Meeting with cruelty wherever he goes, the friendless Creature, increasingly desperate and vengeful, determines to track down his creator and strike a terrifying deal. Urgent concerns of scientific responsibility, parental neglect, cognitive development and the nature of good and evil are embedded within this thrilling and deeply disturbing tale.
Young Violetta and her mother Hannah are a peculiar couple. Ten-year-old Violetta lives a quiet life with her grandmother, while her mother Hannah is an unpredictable photographer who lives off of the generosity of others. When Hannah forces her daughter to pose as a model, Violetta finds her life with her loving grandmother turned upside down.The resulting pictures quickly become a sensation for the trendy 70's Paris art scene, and Violetta finds herself caught in between her new stature as an art muse and her dull childhood.
Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.
A teenager pretends to be dying from cancer as a way to cope with the realities of his daily existence and his father's terminal illness.
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.
Set in New York City's gritty East Village, the revolutionary rock opera RENT tells the story of a group of bohemians struggling to live and pay their rent. "Measuring their lives in love," these starving artists strive for success and acceptance while enduring the obstacles of poverty, illness and the AIDS epidemic.
A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.
The relationship of a couple who meet by chance in New York City is put to the test when they encounter a life or death circumstance.
Dr. Alan Stone breaks new ground for treatment of the mentally ill through an experiment on three paranoid schizophrenic patients who believe they are Jesus Christ.
A young woman's penchant for sensational Gothic novels leads to misunderstandings in the matters of the heart.
The film tells futurist, architect, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller's incredible story through two teens hoping to get laid, become punk gods, and survive high school.
Madeline has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop's ambitious director pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women's lives.
Tala, a London-based Palestinian, is preparing for her elaborate Middle Eastern wedding when she meets Leyla, a young British Indian woman who is dating her best friend. Spirited Christian Tala and shy Muslim Leyla could not be more different from each other, but the attraction is immediate and goes deeper than friendship. But Tala is not ready to accept the implications of the choice her heart has made for her and escapes back to Jordan, while Leyla tries to move on with her new-found life, to the shock of her tradition-loving parents. As Tala's wedding day approaches, simmering tensions come to boiling point and the pressure mounts for Tala to be true to herself.
Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
A pro ball player with a substance abuse problem is forced into rehab in his hometown, finding new hope when he gets honest about his checkered past, and takes on coaching duties for a misfit Little League team
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea, Mathias and Philippe, two old friends, embark on a bicycle journey that Mathias’s son made before his tragic death. The two men ride through the ordeals with tenderness, humor and emotion.