Sphinxes Without Secrets

Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother and her beloved dog.

Ulysses Jenkins composed "Dream City" from documentation of a twenty-four-hour performance he organized in collaboration with David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. A discordant, absurdist, and poetic montage, the video weaves together jazz and punk shows, recitations by Jenkins, and shots of the Los Angeles skyline and oil wells to comment on power and nation in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

This film powerfully documents New York City's gay community's response to the AIDS crisis as they are forced to organize themselves after the government's failure to stem the epidemic. Activists who are interviewed include playwrite Larry Kramer, People With AIDS Coalition co-founder Michael Callen (who died of AIDS in 1994), New York filmmaker and journalist Phil Zwickler, as well as representatives from ACT-UP, Queer Nation and the Gay Men's Health Crisis.

Esther Newton was drawn to the drag scene as a student in the 1950s. Identifying as both butch lesbian and between genders, she felt a kinship with the queens; what the feminine clothing society expected her to wear felt like a form of drag. Her 1972 book ‘Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America’ is noted as the first rigorous study of its kind. Now entering her sixth decade writing about queer communities, Newton exudes wisdom and a healthy dose of New York no-nonsense. The film’s amazing archive footage encompasses gay liberation, the feminist sex wars, AIDS activism and life on the safe haven of Fire Island. Her other main passion is dog training, so this illuminating history lesson is peppered with poodles!

A family travels through Egypt in 6 months.

Rachel Rosenthal, through a performance art workshop, challenges a group of young Los Angelinos on a journey to discover, embrace and illustrate their sense of self.

A horde of rampaging warriors massacre the parents of young Conan and enslave the young child for years on The Wheel of Pain. As the sole survivor of the childhood massacre, Conan is released from slavery and taught the ancient arts of fighting. Transforming himself into a killing machine, Conan travels into the wilderness to seek vengeance on Thulsa Doom, the man responsible for killing his family. In the wilderness, Conan takes up with the thieves Valeria and Subotai. The group comes upon King Osric, who wants the trio of warriors to help rescue his daughter who has joined Doom in the hills.

Count Dracula, a 15th-century prince, is condemned to live off the blood of the living for eternity. Young lawyer Jonathan Harker is sent to Dracula's castle to finalise a land deal, but when the Count sees a photo of Harker's fiancée, Mina, the spitting image of his dead wife, he imprisons him and sets off for London to track her down.

The Pickles family welcome a new arrival, Dil, whose constant crying and need for attention quickly exhaust the other toddlers. Seeking to return the "broken" baby to the hospital, the gang embarks on a journey in a Reptar Wagon that inadvertently veers off course, leaving them stranded in a vast, dangerous forest. While facing off against escaped circus monkeys and a predatory wolf, Tommy must overcome his own resentment to protect his brother and make it back home.

A Harvard anthropologist is sent to Haiti to retrieve a strange powder that is said to have the power to bring human beings back from the dead. In his quest to find the miracle drug, the cynical scientist enters the rarely seen netherworld of walking zombies, blood rites and ancient curses. Based on the true life experiences of Wade Davis and filmed on location in Haiti, it's a frightening excursion into black magic and the supernatural.

A free-spirited woman "kidnaps" a yuppie for a weekend of adventure. But the fun quickly takes a dangerous turn when her ex-con husband shows up.

A parable of the Hollywood image-making industry told through a pastiche of narrative cliches.

A 96 minute internet video collage made during a particularly disorientating time.

Wealthy and bored, Paul and Jennifer Montgomery spend their time in a New York City apartment filled with various amusements. Their routine is upended when door-to-door saleswoman Lisa Schindler drops by and is suddenly taken ill. The couple let her spend the night, and soon, the sophisticated Lisa and her hosts embark on a new set of very adult – and very dangerous – games.

Peter and Katherine Witner are Southern California super-yuppies with great jobs but no center to their lives. When they both lose their jobs and begin marital infidelities, their solution is to start their own business together. In order to find meaning to their empty lives, they follow various New Age gurus and other such groups. Eventually, they hit rock bottom and have to make some hard decisions.

This first feature by Amy Greenfield brings to the screen the story of the daughter of Oedipus in an emotionally relentless, visually stunning New Music Film Opera which challenges the conventions of narrative cinema to create a genre of its own. The 2500-year-old drama of the woman who defied the state to bury her brother is transformed through stark, ceaseless movement, haunting sounds and music (including themes from Glen Branca, David Van Tieghem, Elliot Sharp and Diamanda Galas) and words of outcry against our own world's injustice.

Rare VHS tape of Diamanda Galás performing in 1993.

Video of Rachel Rosenthal’s elaborate performance staged as part of 1984’s Carplay series at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. KabbaLAmobile, commissioned by Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum in 1984, was performed in the Department of Water & Power parking lot. Seven expert drivers and cars from Tom Anthony’s Precision Driving Team and music by performance artist The Dark Bob support Rosenthal’s text. While the cars dance and perform stunts in Kabbalistic formations, Rosenthal chants and declaims both twelfth-century Kabbalistic poetry and copy from automotive magazines in order to show how materialism has supplanted spiritual values in our culture.

RACHEL’S BRAIN, a video collage of a solo to music commissioned by 1987’s Los Angeles Festival, explores the human brain and its place in Gaian evolution. Rosenthal derives witty and provocative visual metaphors and quotes from science in order to explore the disproportionately developed fascism of our most celebrated organ. Rosenthal plays several personae, among them Marie Antoinette, the “flower of the Enlightenment”, and a familiar hominid ancestor of ours. The piece ends on an existential note,Rosenthal searches for a non-existent deity whose absence remains obscured behind the clouds.