Devils Reign

Among the millions of victims of the Nazi madness during the Second World War, Pierre Seel was charged with homosexuality and imprisoned in the Schirmeck concentration camp. He survived this terrifying experience of torture and humiliation, and after the war he married, had three children, and tried to live a normal life. In 1982, however, he came to terms with his past and his true nature and decided to publicly reveal what he and thousands of other homosexuals branded with the Pink Triangle had undergone during the Nazi regime. Il Rosa Nudo (Naked Rose), inspired by the true story of Pierre Seel, depicts in a theatrical and evocative way the Homocaust, focusing on the scientific theories of SS Physician Carl Peter Værnet for the treatment of homosexuality, which paved the way for the Nazi persecution of gay men.

Movie

3.0

1983

Strata

The story means to develop through an uncovering of layers - strata. As writer Krumbachova stated: "With nature as a prison, an impassable barrier ... where every action is physically and psychically limited by the environment ... people are reduced to fragments of basic instinct and intelligence." Promoted as a psychological thriller, Strata provides little tension nor any real climax. The characters are ideas - not believably real.

Movie

1976

Camera, Monitor, Frame

Camera, Monitor, Frame is the first installment of Takahiko Iimura's "Video Semiotics Triptych" (the other two works are Observer/Observed, made in 1975, and Observer/Observed/Observer, made in 1976). The work analyzes the fundamental components of video: the camera, the monitor, and the frame, focusing on the role of each within a system of video as analogous to the functions of vision and speech.

1974

Stuck

Short video art piece.

6.1

1979

Dawn

Szirtes's masterful experimental work is a dazzling composition of several years of filming within an industrial macro/microcosm, an abstract model of revolution and the beauty of daybreak.

Movie

2013

The Trick Brain

A dark and magical visit to the fabled Parisian address Rue Fontaine 42. This was the residence of André Breton, the mastermind of surrealism, who surrounded himself with an impressive collection of modern, Western art and ethnographic objects from Oceania and North America. The collection was sold and divided up in 2003 at a controversial auction. 'The Trick Brain' is a delirious montage and a trip back in time to Breton's private art collection, where Atkins has been scouring the archives and come up with a possessing interior film of the place that once was, complete with surrealistic paintings, scores of Indian figures and hundreds of other displayed rarities. The film's soundtrack is provided by an observant narrator, who reveals to us that the objects shown are not necessarily what they claim to be - but instead are catalysts for some kind of wonderful linguistic virus which reveals the real identity of things.

Movie

4.5

1974

Canadian Pacific I

Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.

Movie

5.0

1975

Canadian Pacific II

Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time

Movie

2009

Openland

Openland is an art film guided by issues surrounding micro states and its derivative definitions. Through intertwining interviews, meta-narratives, and digital landscapes, Openland unfurls a dialogue between consciousness, individuality and collectivity.

Movie

Urgent ou à quoi bon exécuter des projets puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante

5.5

1977

Urgent ou à quoi bon exécuter des projets puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante

Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"

Movie

1980

Lapse Communication

Writes Kobayashi, "In 1972 I started a series of participatory performances where the first person performs an ambiguous action in front of a recording camera; the next person watches the recorded footage and imitates the action in front of a recording camera; the third person repeats the same procedure using the second person's video recording, and so on. Within the repetition of recording and action, the original gesture is transformed by the participants' misunderstanding, interpretation, and memory."

1992

Black Hole Radio

Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of every day life in New York City he had taken over the years. This installation is a portrait of the city with its dark secrets, hushed voices and nocturnal images. In this way Cohen tries to bring across an experience to the viewer that relies on absence, waiting and the effort to hear something in the dark.

Movie

1976

General Motors

Phil Morton's General Motors was created in 1976. Then based in Chicago, the late Phil Morton created this project as a playful and critical video response in conversation with a local General Motors dealership from whom he had purchased a van. Segments 'Colorful Colorado' and 'RYRAL' begin after the video-complaints cease. Produced at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where Morton founded the Video Area), this work includes Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti who collaboratively developed the early Video Art scene in Chicago.

2003

Sylvia Kristel – Paris

Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel , best known for her role in the 1970’s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle, as well as a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography. Between November 2000 and June 2002 Manon de Boer recorded the stories and memories of Kristel. At each recording session she asked her to speak about a city where Kristel has lived: Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels or Amsterdam; over the two years she spoke on several occasions about the same city. At first glance the collection of stories appears to make up a sort of biography, but over time it shows the impossibility of biography: the impossibility of ‘plotting’ somebody’s life as a coherent narrative.

Movie

4.5

1976

Gloria Mundi

An actress of political torture movies made by her husband has to finish his latest film and arrange a screening for distributors while the husband, who is also secretly an anarchist revolutionary, is away for some resistance operation.

Movie

5.0

1996

Animal Charm: Golden Digest

Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

Movie

8.0

1989

Negativland: No Other Possibility

In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.

Movie

4.5

2012

Behind a Hill

This documentary is a journey into our own fascination, a collection of portraits of folk musicians living in New England, and a study of the ground on which their music is founded. We listen to them as they tell their stories and play their music. First and foremost, Behind a Hill is a tribute to these musicians and a rare peep into the house parties and basement jams of New England, in the northwestern corner of the USA, with the vain hope attached that maybe you, the viewer, will grow as fond of the music as we have. When we first encountered these musicians, we were overwhelmed by the quality of their musical output. We were entranced by the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and tempos and every other element that constitutes a song (or, as is often the case, a piece of abstract drone music, heavy feedback, or someone banging a steel pipe against a bag of dirt while chanting in a yet undiscovered language, or...).

Movie

5.6

1973

Mona Lisa

An experimental short film from Toshio Matsumoto featuring Mona Lisa.

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