The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.
Middle-aged widow Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters Ruth and Matilda are struggling to survive in a society they barely understand. Beatrice dreams of opening an elegant tea room but does not have the wherewithal to achieve her lofty goal. Epileptic Ruth is a rebellious adolescent, while shy but highly intelligent and idealistic Matilda seeks solace in her pets and school projects, including one designed to show how small amounts of radium affect marigolds.
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A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
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Rory is an ambitious entrepreneur who brings his American wife and kids to his native country, England, to explore new business opportunities. After abandoning the sanctuary of their safe American suburban surroundings, the family is plunged into the despair of an archaic '80s Britain and their unaffordable new life in an English manor house threatens to destroy the family.
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An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.
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A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
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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.
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While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.
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Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.
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An uninterrupted rehearsal of Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya' plays out by a company of actors. The setting: their run-down theater with an unusable stage and crumbling ceiling. The play is shown act by act with the briefest of breaks to move props or for refreshments. The lack of costumes, real props and scenery is soon forgotten.
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Michael is a 24-year-old who has cerebral palsy and long-term resident of the Carrigmore Residential Home for the Disabled, run by the formidable Eileen. His life is transformed when the maverick Rory O'Shea moves in.
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In this experimental film, Borden explores the dynamics among the members of a woman’s group. As she interviews people who know them, such as Joan Jonas, the group shoots ‘artistic’ scenes of themselves – but Borden feels they aren’t fully grappling with issues of sexuality and politics. Are they a serious group – or just friends? After showing an early edit of the film to the group, its members, upset, close ranks. Undeterred, Borden incorporates the group’s arguments into another edit, filming larger groups commenting both on the original one and on consciousness-raising groups in general. Uncredited voices include those of Barbara Kruger and Kathryn Bigelow.
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they're one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he's covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early '90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don't Blink is Israel's like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90.
The film traces the rise of one of the world's premier architects, Norman Foster, and his unending quest to improve the quality of life through design.
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), the most important sculptor of the first half of the 20th century, has been a fascinating and enduring influence on a generation of contemporary American artists. Insights into Brancusi’s legacy are presented by Carl Andre, Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Martin Puryear, Richard Serra, and Joel Shapiro, with additional commentary on Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Isamu Noguchi,and Claes Oldenburg. In 1995, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, asked Checkerboard to document the PMA’s acclaimed retrospective on Brancusi for the Museum’s archive. The resulting footage became the genesis of the documentary.
Soundtrack by Philip Glass
He Saw Her Burning, which is based on a 1983 performance, is a provocative narrative collage, a surreal juxtaposition of two narrated texts. A man and a woman begin their respective tales: He saw a woman burst into flames on the street; she saw an American soldier go berserk and drive a tank into a crowd. Produced while Jonas was living in Berlin on an artist's fellowship, the disjunctive narratives are pervaded with a sense of cultural dislocation and alienation. The man and woman occupy separate narrative spaces as they tell their stories, which are intercut with a pastiche of word games, narrative reenactments, filmed sequences, isolated gestures and objects. Memory — elusive and ephemeral, personal and collective — is the catalyst for this complex work.
Originally broadcast on public television in Amarillo, TX, Richard Serra’s BOOMERANG features Nancy Holt framed in a medium shot with a pair of headphones on her ears. We observe her as she speaks and then hears her words relayed back to her through a delayed transmission. Remarkably eloquent for one caught in such a feedback loop, Holt provides a monologue on experiencing time, thought, and oneself through technology. She remarks, “I have a double take on myself. I am once removed from myself … we are hearing and seeing a world of double reflections and double refractions.”
This short film shot in Iceland and New York, which is based on a thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, features Tilda Swinton as a young woman whose dreams foretell the future.
Presents an intimate view of four decades of the Swiss-born artist Robert Frank who has had an extraordinary influence on contemporary photography and filmmaking. This documentary which examines his life through his films and photographs, includes interviews with many of his collaborators and contemporaries. Written, directed and edited by Philip Brookman, Amy Brookman
An artist in his own right, Clark Winter captured the intimacy of his longtime friendships with Robert Frank and June Leaf in a series of videos shot over nearly 30 years in New York and Nova Scotia. These are a precious record of the married couple’s seemingly inseparable—yet resolutely independent—home and work lives. Today, Winter serves as one of only three board members of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. — Museum of Modern Art
A short film by Richard Serra
A project June initiated shortly after Robert’s death in 2019, Another Light in the Road stands as a testament not only to the artist couple’s powerfully intimate and creative relationship but also to their enduring ties to the Mabou community of Cape Breton, as we see friends and neighbors gather in the warmth of her kitchen to share colorful stories. Robert and June were profoundly shaped by the landscape of Mabou, with its bitterly windswept winters, its rhythms of sea and light, and its pioneering routine of wood gathering, clothes hanging, window gazing, and art making. After Robert’s death, June continued working tirelessly on new sculptures and paintings. Not long before her own death, on July 1, 2024, June was able to watch a cut of the film and share her satisfaction with Whalen and Parlante, confiding, “You must be very happy to have made this film. I am happy to have this.” — Museum of Modern Art
Disturbances extends Jonas' investigation of mirrored surfaces and spaces, as she explores reflections of movement and images in water. The tape begins with Jonas, like Narcissus, leaning over a reflecting pool. Throughout this lyrical exercise, the viewer sees only reflected images and inversions, disturbances of the water's surface. Figures walking at the edge of the pool are seen as abstracted shimmers, upside down and backwards; shadowy figures move underwater and swim through the pool as in a choreographed dance. This simply rendered, evocative work is a phenomenological study of reflection, as Jonas draws a parallel between the spatial and mirroring effects of water and video.
The Making of Amarillo Ramp documents the construction of Robert Smithson's earthwork Amarillo Ramp. At age thirty-five, while photographing the site of the earthwork in progress, Smithson died in a small airplane accident, along with pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Robert E. Curtin. After Smithson's passing, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi completed Amarillo Ramp according to Smithson's specifications. This film documents the sounds and actions of the powerful machinery necessary to create an earthwork of this scale, while underscoring the human skill and personal relationships that were integral to the completion of the work.
“…Railroad Turnbridge is about the meeting of machine and machine [camera and bridge] and how they and their movements, sometimes parallel, sometimes in opposition, frame the landscape which surrounds them. A shot of the landscape seen through the rectangles of the bridge’s opening, the bridge [becomes], in movement, a giant extension of the camera viewfinder…” Amy Taubin, Soho News
From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really changed?" We requested them to tell us a story to illustrate their reply, and we filmed them.
Based on Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “Universe,” Double Lunar Dogs presents a vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a “spacecraft,” travelling aimlessly through the universe, whose passengers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. As a metaphor for the nature and purpose of memory, the two main characters (portrayed by Jonas and Spalding Gray) play games with images of their past; but their efforts to restore their collective memories are futile, and they are reprimanded by the “Authority” for their attempts to recapture their past on a now-destroyed planet Earth.
Scenes from the life of a quiet man and a smart woman. They carry the celebrated surnames Frank and Leaf, both of which were crucial to the 20th century North American art scene, but here they are just Robert and June. Jem Cohen’s camera brims with tenderness for his beloved friends in their late years, searching for their presence in the calming topography of Mabou, Nova Scotia, or the urban decay of New York’s Bleecker Street. Drifting, mutating textures and formats, breathing along with changing landscapes. An exercise in spending time with the world. (Viennale)
Two women kiss.
