Niki de Saint Phalle began her artistic career, encouraged by the painter Hugh Weiss. “Les Tirs“, meaning “the shots” were the performances that made her famous, during which spectators were invited to shoot with rifles at pockets of paint, thus splashing plaster assemblages. These works placed her firmly in the circle of 'new realists', playing the role of mediator between the French and American avant-garde.
Watch Rashid Johnson's The New Black Yoga (2011)
Representing the performative aspect of Johnson’s practice,The New Black Yoga (2011) is a short film depicting an enigmatic scenario in which five African-American men perform choreographed movements on a deserted beach. Their gestures alternately appear balletic, athletic, and martial, conjuring a range of potential narratives that ultimately remain elusive. Johnson’s 2016 installation Antoine’s Organ is included in the New Museum’s current exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.
Celebrate Womxn's Day By Watching Carolee Schneeman's Meat Joy On The Anniversary Of Her Recent Passing
Writes Schneemann: Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the "sacred erotic." This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City. Via Electronic Arts Intermix
Filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau. Editor: Bob Giorgio.
Read Our Interview Of Film Director Fiona Jane Burgess →
Fiona Jane Burgess, UK-based film director specializing in music videos, commercials, documentaries and fashion films, owes much of her career success to experiencing a number of challenges. Burgess found herself having to rethink her career path at 28, a time when she was also facing the realities of motherhood and the breakup of her band, Woman’s Hour. Fortunately, her natural flare as a director, which she exercised when shooting her own music videos, determined her career segue into film direction. Since delving into the film industry, Burgess has worked on diverse campaigns that span music videos, personal projects, working with the UK’s No.1 Baby Feeding brand, Tommee Tippee and some of fashion’s most recognised names, including Gucci and Burberry. Read more.
Patrisse Cullors' New Short Film Whispers: Pray for LA is a Meditation on a City Reeling from Compounded Crises
Whispers: Pray For LA is Patrisse Cullors’ latest work developed amidst an unprecedented surge in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles this past winter. As part of a larger ongoing project entitled ‘Pray for LA’ launched by her artist collective The Crenshaw Dairy Mart at the beginning of 2021, the initiative and forthcoming works are an offering to the thousands of Angelenos and their families suffering from the intersections of COVID-19, racism and the ultimate neglect of a county, state and country that has deliberately focused on profit over people.
Cullors’ Whispers specifically calls us to the ocean to offer up our hearts, our grief and our fight to see the death and sickness that surrounds los angeles county as it fights to keep afloat amongst the terror of COVID-19.
Whispers asks all of us to call for a world where every family has access to healthcare, to food, to shelter.
Whispers asks us to dream and practice this vision through abolition.
This video project was commissioned by Tilt West, a denver-based arts nonprofit. It will be included in the third volume of the Tilt West journal, devoted to the topic of art and labor, scheduled for release on september 2, 2021. You can check out the second volume of the Tilt West journal, on art and community here.
Directed and produced by: Patrisse Cullors
Edited by: Giovanni Solis
Scored by: Meshell Ndegeocello
California African American Museum Hosts Virtual Screening of Body and Soul
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux, a pioneer of African American cinema, produced more than forty films during the dawn of the 20th century, including Body and Soul (1925). The silent film features the acclaimed stage actor and activist Paul Robeson, who performs as both a mystifying preacher and doting inventor, capturing the seduction of faith and the complicated power structures that can surround it. This new digital restoration, which is included in the Pioneers of African American Cinema collection, has been produced by the artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, who also contributed a new score for the 2015 re-release. The online screening of Body and Soul is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Enunciated Life, which utilizes Black spiritual beliefs as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender and includes work by Steffani Jemison, a contemporary artist whose practice is in dialogue with Micheaux’s films.
CAAM will host the screening Thursday, February 25 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. RSVP for screening instructions.
Appalachian Spring: Rare Performance of Martha Graham's Iconic Masterwork Available Via Planet Classroom
Premiering in 1944 with an original score by Aaron Copland, set design by Isamu Noguchi, and costuming by Martha Graham.
Cast and Credits
DIRECTOR: Peter Glushanok
PRODUCER: Nathan Kroll
EDITOR: Eleanor Hamerow
CAST: Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Preacher, Matt Turney as The Pioneering Woman, and Miriam Cole, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, and Yuriko as The Followers.
Highways Performance Space Presents Film Maudit 2.0 Virtual Festival
Film Maudit 2.0 is a film festival dedicated to outré films inspired by the legendary artist Jean Cocteau’s “1949 Festival Du Film Maudit”, which celebrated a group of films that were criminally overlooked and neglected at the time. Taking its title from the French expression meaning “cursed films,” this showcase of counter-cinema blends together narrative, documentary, and experimental films that in their style and/or subject matter, are deliberately bold, confrontational, troubling, and/or shocking.
The Film Maudit 2.0 festival features over 125 works of cinema from 25 countries including films rarely if ever, seen in festivals: works addressing sociopolitical issues and taboo subject matter that challenges conventional artistic assumptions and sexual mores.
Film Maudit 2.0 is free and available to view online January 12 – 24
Brooke Wise's Aloha From Hell Is An Apt Short Film Festival To Conclude A Nightmarishly Long Year
text by Avery Wheless
As we wrap a year of the unpredictable and frightening, it’s clear that comedy serves as a good access point to observe the macabre in life. This is no new approach for curator Brooke Wise, who is notorious for utilizing humor while approaching complicated topics. Wise reasons, “You can get so much across with humor, especially with so much darkness happening at the moment, it’s the best tool we have.”
Luckily, Wise has blessed us once again with her fourth round of Aloha From Hell, a film festival calling together creatives of all kinds with proceeds benefiting Planned Parenthood LA in partnership with Depop.
Aloha from Hell is typically a Halloween festival, but in a year where schedule is neither here nor there, Wise delivers her satirical and spooky cinematic experience right in time for the holidays.
Unlike most film festivals, submissions are open to all creatives, musicians, artists, comedians, and more. The resulting selection features traditional filmmaking, experimental video, narrative and performance art— proving you don’t need to be an actual filmmaker to make a video.
This year features creatives such as Chloe Wise, Benny Drama, Mia Kerin, Kate Jean Hollowell, Mark Indelicato, Miles McMillan, Dinah Rankin, Ew Yuk! And musical guests, Okay Kaya and Kacy Hill. The festival’s common thread of uncanny and outlandish opens conversations through a visually experimental context, while addressing raw and diverse topics in regards to gender and sexuality.
Known for combining her curatorial work with raising funds for charitable organizations, Wise chose Planned Parenthood specifically for Aloha from Hell, as an open expression of gender and sexuality is rooted at the core of many of the showcased films.
Reasoning that the best way to face all things scary is through a lens of playfulness, Aloha from Hell delivers just the right amount of the obscene, kooky and irreverent, brightening the quarantine and making us all feel a little less fucked up.
Aloha From Hell will be screened virtually on December 22 from 5-8pm PST.
Art Of The Divine: Kilo Kish and Rikkí Wright In Conversation →
Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright
Rikkí Wright and Kilo Kish are two of the eight artists exhibiting in this year’s edition of Womxn in Windows, a socially distant group show that clearly presaged the conditions of our current moment in its first edition last year. Visitors are invited to walk along the storefronts of Chung King Road in Chinatown and watch short films through each window with scores that can be accessed via QR code. Founded and curated by Zehra Ahmed, this year’s artists were invited to exhibit work that examines the intertwined relationships between culture, religion, and society. These films remind us how womxn have relied on faith and on each other as well as on a desire for equality, understanding, and the power to make the right choices for ourselves. In both Wright and Kish’s films one observes an intimate relationship with the spiritual, however from highly contrasting perspectives and with completely unique aesthetics. Click here to read more.
Anatomy Of A Scene: Christiane F. and Her Band Of Misfits Run Through The Europa Center In Berlin
Christiane F. (Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo) is a 1981 German biographical drama film directed by Uli Edel that portrays the drug scene in West Berlin in the 1970s, based on the 1978 non-fiction book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Zoo Station), transcribed and edited from tape recordings by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck. The film features David Bowie as both himself and the soundtrack composer.
Watch "Dirty Girls" A Short Documentary About Teenage Angst In The 1990s
Shot in 1996 and edited in 2000, this is a short documentary about a group of 13-year-old riot grrrls in Los Angeles who were socially ostracized at their school by their peers and upperclassmen. Everyone in the schoolyard held strong opinions about these so-called "dirty girls," and meanwhile the "dirty girls" themselves aimed to get their message across by distributing their zine across campus. Directed by Michael Lucid. Music: "Batmobile" by Liz Phair.
Brooke Wise Teams Up With Comedy Central & Sexy Beast To Host Aloha From Hell Film Festival
This Halloween, curator Brooke Wise teamed up with Sexy Beast and Comedy Central on a special third installment of her short film festival, Aloha From Hell, with proceeds benefitting Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. All of the wild, comedic, satirical and spooky videos selected for the festival are under 5 minutes in length, chosen via open online submission, and crafted in response to this year’s theme: SHE DEVILS.
Watch PAISA: A New Short Film That Celebrates The Beauty Of Queer Brown Sensuality
Inspired by artist Dorian Wood's song of the same name, PAISA is an immersive fever dream that celebrates the beauty of queer brown sensuality, body positivity and individuality. Says Dorian: "We have been marginalized and painted into tight corners for far too long. But even in our darkest times, we make room to celebrate ourselves and others within our communities. With PAISA, I wanted to create a permanent reminder for us queer, trans and non-binary folks of color that our beauty stretches within and far beyond our times, in either direction. We embrace individuality and respect, even when the rest of the world struggles with these 'radical' concepts. We exist and we don't need for the rest of the world to get wise to our existence. We are sensual beings, in all forms and flavors. Even the sexual moments we share with those on the 'downlow', we find love and positivity there, and we acknowledge the fact that these secretive moments are taboo because of an oppressive morality that has decimated humans for decades. Sex positivity grounded in mindfulness and consent. We are wiser than this world gives us credit for. We are powerful and plentiful. We are forever."
Read Our Interview Of Chris Gentile Director Of Self Discovery For Social Survival On The Occasion Of The LA Premiere →
Surf Discovery for Social Survival is the surf/music feature film born from the collaboration of Chris Gentile from New York-based surf brand Pilgrim Surf + Supply and Keith Abrahmsson from the record label Mexican Summer. Together they started this ambitious project to connect surf, sound and sight and make a film that would satisfy most senses. World-renowned surfers including Stephanie Gilmore, Ryan Burch, Creed McTaggart and Ellis Ericson joined musicians Allah-Las, Peaking Lights, Connan Mockasin and MGMT ’s Andrew VanWyngarden on this surf journey starting from a secret spot in Mexico, to the southern atolls of the Maldive Islands, and ending in the cold waters of Iceland. Click here to read more.
Teo Hernández Presents "Shatter Appearances" @ Villa Vassilieff In Paris
Teo Hernández: Shatter appearances is the result of a long-term curatorial research around this filmmaker’s work and archive. Between 1968 and 1991, he produced approximately 160 films, ranging in time and formats (8mm, Super-8 and 16mm). The exhibition includes materials not only from his personal archive, but also from his close collaborators, friends and relatives. Centered around three themes (The Self Filmed, Bodily Vertigo; Intimate City), the goal is to emphasize his radical intention to produce a tactile cinema informed by performing arts and contemporary dance, in order to to invoke future bodies and realities. This project does not propose a canonical interpretation of his work, but rather offers the experience of some of Hernández’s concerns, obsessions, and desires circling identity, the body and the city. Shatter Appearances will be on view through April 27 at Villa Vassilieff Chemin de Montparnasse 21 avenue du Maine, Paris. photographs by Aurélien Mole
Beatrice Gibson Presents "Crone Music" @ Camden Arts Center In London
Crone Music presents two new, interconnected films by British artist Beatrice Gibson, alongside an expanded events programme in Gallery 3 featuring the artists, poets, musicians and wider community with whom the films have been made. Borrowing its title from American composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1990 album of the same name, the exhibition seeks out an explicitly feminist lineage through which to recast the syncretic, collective and participatory nature of Gibson’s practice. Crone Music is on view through March 31 at Camden Arts Center Arkwright Road, London. photographs courtesy of Camden Arts Center
Read Our Interview of Cam Screenwriter Isa Mazzei & Star Madeline Brewer On The Occasion Of The Film's Premiere On Netflix →
For anyone who has painstakingly worked to build and curate their Instagram page, only to have it disabled unexpectedly, you know just how devastating the loss can be. For those whose accounts have been hacked, the consequences can be much worse. Thus is the case for Alice (played by Madeline Brewer), a young and ambitious camgirl on the rise, who is relentlessly creating new shows and characters to improve her ranking on freegirls.live, a fictional camming site, designed and created specifically for the film. When Alice’s account is hacked and hijacked by someone with an uncanny resemblance, she is forced to outwit her doppelgänger while watching her own identity, both online and irl, degrade rapidly. Aside from the psychic thrill that the narrative provides, this film offers a refreshing subversion to the standard tropes that come from the sexy, horror genre. From the ways that sex work is represented in the film, to the ways that the screenwriter, Isa Mazzei and director, Daniel Goldhaber challenge the standard director-authorship, this film provides a wealth of new templates to consider that are seemingly radical, yet unsurprisingly, quite logical. In Mazzei and Goldhaber’s Cam, the hyper-indulgent and semi-private world of camming is given life in a way that is instantly translatable by the genre. A surreal, thrill ride that seeps into your unconscious mind and humanizes the very real people that hitherto have been unjustly stigmatized by the film and media industry at large.
Click here to read the full interview.
Cam is available to stream as of today on Netflix.
Lorraine Nicholson's Tribeca-Nominated Life Boat Is Now Available Online
A group of students are brought together to play a real-life game called “Life Boat.” After the customary “get to know each other” exercise, their counselor Mr. Drexler (Stephen Dorff) poses a difficult question: if this classroom were a sinking ship, who in the group deserves to be saved?
Mr. Drexler’s tactics are far from textbook, which immediately becomes clear to our protagonist, Elsa (Elizabeth Gilpin). Mr. Drexler, a survivor of a similar program, gets caught up in the emotions of his exercise. As the game and stakes heighten, he successfully demonstrates his apathetic students’ real desire to save their lives. But at what cost?
Watch The Online Premiere of Soil: An Exploration Of Manipulation, Dependency, and Objectification
Soil is the debut film by Mathilde Huron & Julian Feeld. It was shot on Fuji Super 16mm film in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of Southern France and scored by Pontus Berghe, ex-member of Thieves Like Us and current member of Thunder Tillman, with featured actors Joe Rezwin, Liza Journo & Sati Leonne Faulks.
A young filmmaker with mixed intentions sets out to document the friendship between a fifteen-year-old Parisian girl and a homeless alcoholic on the verge of death. Between documentary and fiction, Soil is an exploration of manipulation, dependency, and objectification. This experimental psycho-thriller — a mix of documentary and fiction — was screened in Paris, Tokyo and Los Angeles.