Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti

An unconventional portrait of painter Frida Kahlo and photographer Tina Modotti. Simple in style but complex in its analysis, it explores the divergent themes and styles of two contemporary and radical women artists working in the upheaval of the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.

L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Bloed

Elles Kiers and Sjef Meijman lived intensively with four Bunte Bentheimer pigs for seven months. During the slaughter month they had their beloved pig Bom killed and then prepared it themselves. The short documentary Blood (Dinanda Luttikhedde, 2011) follows the visual artists in the final phase of their research project into the origin of our food. A valuable ritual unfolds around the processing of this animal.

You See... I've Had a Life

This film reveals through flashbacks how a 13-year-old boy and his family attempt to deal with the child's fatal affliction with leukemia. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Dworzec

Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.

Primary

Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconventional way of filming created a new look for documentary films where the camera’s lens was right in the middle of what ever drama was occurring. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1998.

Takeda

Takeda is a film about the universality of the human being seen thru the eyes of a Japanese painter that has adopted the Mexican culture.

夢と狂気の王国

Follows the behind-the-scenes work of Studio Ghibli, focusing on the notable figures Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki.

How Animated Cartoons Are Made

Wallace Carlson walks viewers through the production of an animated short at Bray Studios.

Revolution: New Art for a New World

Drawing on the collections of major Russian institutions, contributions from contemporary artists, curators and performers and personal testimony from the descendants of those involved, the film brings the artists of the Russian Avant-Garde to life. It tells the stories of artists like Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich - pioneers who flourished in response to the challenge of building a new art for a new world, only to be broken by implacable authority after 15 short years and silenced by Stalin's Socialist Realism.

Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

The film explores the role of photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present. The dramatic arch is developed as a visual narrative that flows through the past 160 years to reveal black photography as an instrument for social change, an African American point-of-view on American history, and a particularized aesthetic vision.

Die Bauten Adolf Hitlers

Nazi Third Reich propaganda film that used architecture as a statement about "racial accomplishment," and so called "racial superiority." Hitler claimed that between 1934 and 1940, the Nazi rule of Germany had produced architectural uniqueness, and this film was produced to shown to attempt to validate that. The opening montage gives a survey of earlier Gothic and Baroque structures in the country as an example of "architectural superiority" that the German race was said to be the sole inventor of; then moves on to deride the recent construction of the Bauhaus school (with a racially motivated score of Jazz music) and an example of German "architectural decay." Then proceeds to show off buildings constructed by the Nazi and an architectural revival, to "last 1000 years," Film also spends a great of time dwelling on massive and "busy" monuments that had been erected all over the county.

Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb

The dangers of drug use by teenagers are illustrated by showing how well-dressed, happy teens are turned into slovenly, long-haired, drug-addled potheads who don't know that, according to the film's drug expert, “in high dosages, it [marijuana] parallels LSD.”

Burden of Dreams

The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.

The Virginia Tripping Film

Carlo McCormick was invited to curate an East Village Art show at a gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland took filmic evidence of the infamous exhibition that featured downtown artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Marilyn Minter, Luis Frangella and more painting naughty murals while on acid.

Les chiens-loups

3 Still Standing

Three stand-up comedians seek fame and fortune in the hottest comedy scene in the world: San Francisco in the 1980s.

One Year Lease

Phone messages from the cat-loving landlord living directly above you. Ah, New York.

Portrait de mon père aquarelliste

The father through the eye of the son, the painter through the eye of the filmmaker. Started at random 10 years ago, the picture rewrites in a very subjective way the life of Roger Gobron - born in 1899 in Brussels - who, through his pictorial research, succeeded in giving watercolors a new dimension. "In Belgium, artists are evaluated according to the price of their paintings", A tribute to this simple and generous man who searched and painted watercolors his whole life.

Portrait de ma mère poète

Intimate portrait of Marie-Jo Gobron, belgian poet and the director's mother. 20 years after the release of a film about his father's paintings, the filmmaker continues the description of the artistic universe of his parents. Born in 1916 in Flanders near the French border, Marie-Jo writes mostly in French. Aged 85, she starts an autobiographical novel about her youth, its many events, and about her daring emancipation in art and love, which she confides here.