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UK, 2010 / 90 min’s / col’ / directed by Clio Barnard
Produced by Tracy O'Riordan, Executive Producer - Michael Morris
An Artangel /UK Film Council Production
A street in Bradford, Northern England known as "The Arbor" left an indelible impression on playwright Andrea Dunbar. She grew up there, named her first play after it and based all of her subsequent work there, of which her best known Rita Sue and Bob Too was adapted successfully for the big screen in 1987. She died tragically at the age of 29, leaving 3 young children.
Director Clio Barnard could have adapated Dunbar's play The Arbor for the screen or made a conventional documentary on her life, but instead she has crafted a captivating and truly unique work that transcends genre and defies categorization. Following two years conducting audio interviews with Dunbar's family, friends and neighbours, Barnard filmed actors lip-synching the interviews, flawlessly interpreting every breath, tick and nuance. Barnard's film focuses in particular on the playwright's troubled relationship with her daughter Lorraine who was just 10 when her mother died. Barnard connects with Lorraine, now aged 29 herself, to re-introduce her to her mother's plays and private letters, prompting her to reflect on the extraordinary parallels between their lives.
Interwoven with these interviews are staged scenes of Dunbar;s play filmed on "The Arbor", the street where she lived. Barnard seamlessly stitches these disparate but innovative elements matching Dunbar's unconventional life with a befittingly unconventional film.
UK, 2005 / 95 min’s / col’ & b&w / directed by Adam Low / music by Brian Eno
International Emmy – Nomination for Best Arts Programme
Chicago International Film Festival - Gold Plaque, Best Arts/Humanities film
Bacon’s Arena is a co-production between the BBC and the Estate of Francis Bacon made in the run-up to the artist’s centenary in 2009.
The director Adam Low, links Francis Bacon’s art and life by reviewing his paintings through their connection to his relationships with six different men in six decades of his life. Archival footage is used in such a way that Bacon and his work are given a powerful presence. We experience him as a very charming man, in striking contrast to his paintings of screaming popes and deformed bodies, which many perceive as extremely violent.
But Bacon himself was of the opinion: ‘No work has the violence that life itself has.’ The ‘flesh’, the opened skin becomes the place of desire for him: ‘How can you cut your flesh open and join it with the other person?’ asks Bacon in the film. ‘It’s not possible to do…everything escapes you even if you are in love with somebody…and so it is with art; it’s almost like a long affair with images, sensations, passions.’
Originally broadcast by the BBC in 2005, the documentary has been expanded into a much bigger package for DVD release, with an extensive array of extras, films and interviews, produced exclusively by the Estate of Francis Bacon to coincide with the centenary.
BEAUTY WITHIN US – THE PHOTOGRAPHER JOCK STURGES
Germany, 2009 / 52 min’s / col’ & b&w / directed by Christian Klinger & Thomas Tielsch
The American Jock Sturges is regarded internationally as one of the most important
photographers working in portraiture. His enduring theme is the female nude and “nudity as a natural state” and his photographic style one of portraying a classical aesthetic of beauty. Sturges takes his photographs mostly on the nudist beaches of Europe – where he spends his summers.
As his work touches on a taboo subject, controversy is never far away. Child pornography charges in the US were dismissed but also in Europe there have been problems when his pictures are exhibited. His models are among the staunchest supporters of his work and are consistently at ease with their portrayal in his pictures, including adults whom Sturges first photographed as children. The filmmakers take the approach of allowing Sturges to speak for his own art (as he works) and his family and models to speak for themselves, leaving viewers to make up their own minds on the thorny issues.
“He has continued a tradition which before photography was common practice in painting. The beauty of the body which is also the beauty of nature, he shows them as interrelated.”
Jean-Christophe Amman, buyer of Sturges work for the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt.
BLACK SUN –The Esoteric Culture of the Third Reich
Germany, 1999 / 90 min’s / col’ & b&w / written and directed by Rudiger Sunner
For more than sixty years, historians, political scientists and others have attempted to explain the murderous ideology of National Socialism-in particular the theories of its founders Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg-and their dreams of a "Thousand-Year Reich" of Aryan world domination, which led to the Holocaust, war crimes and other atrocities.
BLACK SUN sheds new light on the sources of Nazi ideology by examining its occult roots in the world of myths, symbols and fantasies. It traces this development from the writings of various mystics in the early 20th century, which located the original home of the Germanic peoples in sunken continents such as "Thule" and "Atlantis," and propagated the mythology of a superior Nordic race whose heroes fought the forces of moral decadence and racial impurity.
The film uses interviews, rare archival footage and contemporary scenes shot in historic locales throughout Germany to chronicle how the Nazis used these mythological foundations to develop Nazism as a political religion, with the SS conceived as a "Holy Order" defending "Aryan light" from the "Jewish-Bolshevik darkness." It profiles some of the more eccentric members of the SS-including Karl Maria Wiligut, Richard Anders and Otto Rahn-plus cofounders of the Ancestral Heritage Society-Wolfram Sievers and Herman Wirth-who conducted anthropological and archaeological research to confirm their theories of a "master race."
While BLACK SUN documents the nationalist mystical beliefs that infused National Socialism, the film also reveals the disturbing perpetuation of these beliefs among certain cult groups in Germany today, reflecting an ongoing search for salvation, inspiration and messianic leaders.
UK / 2009 / 52mins / col / directed by Paul Joyce
Hockney on Photography is a documentary exploration of Britain’s greatest living artist’s on-off love affair with photography and of the revolutionary innovations he has made to the artform. David Hockney began experimenting with photography in the 1970’s and the first appearance of his highly distinctive collages such as Nude (posed by Theresa Russell) had a huge impact in the art world and among a wider public.
Hockney takes us on a personal journey of discovery, tracing his own footsteps as he shows us how he explored the possibilities of what the camera had to offer and how the results fed back into his other artistic preoccupations (Painting, Drawing, Fax Art, Photocopying, etc.). Using many examples of his own unique work he guides us through this extraordinary journey of visual exploration, which culminated in one of his greatest works: ‘Pearblossom Highway’ which is now housed in the Getty Museum.
Director Paul Joyce’s previous collaborations with Hockney on two major books (‘Hockney on Photography’ and ‘Hockney on Art’) allowed him unprecedented access not just to Hockney himself but to his huge photographic archive, much of which has been rarely seen before (but which provides continuous illustrations for the documentary).
OSCAR NIEMEYER (Oscar Niemeyer a Vide e um Sopro)
Brazil, 2007 / 90 mins & 52 mins / col’ & b&w / A film by Fabiano Maciel and Sacha
Oscar Niemeyer is one of the greatest architects that the world has ever seen and this documentary, made to coincide with his 100th birthday reveals a truly remarkable man. Still working and revealing an amazingly undiminished intellect and physical capacity, Oscar Niemeyer recounts his long life and remarkably prolific output. This included the designing of an entire city, Brasilia, and an astonishing array of eye-catching landmark buildings in Brazil and elsewhere, captured by the filmmakers with the aid of some fine camerawork.
On camera he demonstrates his love of drawing and with a remarkably steady hand undiminished by age, he lightly sketches the outlines of many of his landmark buildings, whilst at the same time recounting his life and times, his ideals for a fairer society and metaphysical issues such as the insignificance of Man compared to the Universe.
Niemeyer is one of the great 20th-century modernists. Along with peers like the Bauhaus director Walter Gropius and Corbusier, Niemeyer was enchanted by modern building techniques that liberated architects from traditional structural concerns, but his seductive and sensuous architecture was often at odds with modernism’s push toward building standardization.
It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, tough, inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free, sensual curve. The curve I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the waves of the sea, in the clouds of the sky, in the body of my favorite woman. The whole universe is made of curves.
Oscar Niemeyer
REM KOOLHAAS - A KIND OF ARCHITECT
Germany, 2007 / 97 mins / col / Directed by: Markus Heidingsfelder and Min Tesch
Rem Koolhaas is one of the world’s most renowned architects and commissioned for landmark projects all across the globe. His outstanding creations such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the Seattle Library, the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto and the Guggenheim Heritage Museum in Las Vegas are working examples of the Dutchman’s visionary theories about architecture and urban society.
Koolhaas' work is as much about ideas as it is about constructing buildings; he is equally celebrated as a writer and social commentator, his 1978 publication Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is heralded as a seminal text on modern architecture and society. Another publication S, M, L, XL is a highly influential 1376-page tome combining essays, manifestos, diaries, fiction, travelogues, and meditations on the contemporary city.
For Koolhaas what is essential is not to create individual masterpieces, but to provoke and excite through the wide range of his activities. Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect is an engaging visually inventive and thought provoking portrait of a visionary man, which takes us to the heart of his ideas.
“the only movie about me that I like”.
Rem Koolhaas
SHOOTING ROBERT KING (formerly Blood Trail)
UK, 2008 / 78 min’s / col / directed by Richard Parry
Award & Nominations.
Best Cinema Documentary Nomination – British Documentary Awards, 2009.
Outstanding Achievement in Production Nomination – Cinema Eye Non-fiction Awards, 2009.
Synopsis: In 1993 a young American named Robert King travelled to Bosnia, a naive 23 year old just out of art school with an ambition to become a war photographer and dreaming of a Pulitzer Prize. He hardly knew the rules of the game and seemed lost and out of place in the Sarajevo war zone, but those who thought he wouldn’t last were proved wrong and over the course of the film we see how King grew as a person and a professional as he moved on to cover wars in Chechnya and Iraq. Filmed over the course of 15 years, Shooting Robert King shows the unvarnished truth behind the images that emerged from those war zones as it records Robert's life from boy to man, to husband and father.
Completely blown away by it. It's beautifully put together, and by far the best war doc I have seen ...
Nick Broomfield, filmmaker
Stylishly filmed, laced through with humor, some horror, and the ever-present whiff of despair, Shooting Robert King makes for compulsive viewing
New Yorker Magazine
Richard Parry's documentary provides an intriguing glimpse into the driving forces that have King and his ilk coming back for more despite the inherent dangers...
The Hollywood Reporter
This fascinating account of the unheralded heroes of international conflict - the journos, photographers and cameramen - succeeds for exactly the same reasons as the best reportage: by focusing on just one story, it somehow tells many more.
Film4
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