Alexander Sokurov: Questions about cinema (2008)
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Indian documentary about Indian film history and P. K. Nair, the founder of the National Film Archive of India and guardian of Indian cinema. He built the archive can by can in a country where the archiving of cinema was considered unimportant.
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THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Žižek delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves.
A 1988 documentary film directed by Alexander Sokurov, about the later life and death of Soviet Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was originally intended to mark the 50th birthday of Tarkovsky in 1982, which would have been before his death. Controversy with Soviet authorities about the film's style and content led to significant delays in the production.
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Videograms of a Revolution is a 1992 documentary film compiled by Harun Farocki and Andrei UjicÄ from over 125 hours of amateur footage, news footage, and excerpts from the Bucharest TV studio overtaken by demonstrators as part of the December 1989 Romanian Revolution. In 2004 the Austrian Film Archive selected the documentary as part of its Die Utopie Film program for The Best 100 in Film History list.
This episode focuses on Zappa's early 70s albums, Overnight Sensation (1973) and Apostrophy (') (1974). Together they encapsulate Zappa's extraordinary musical diversity and were also the 2 most commercially successful albums that he released in his prolific career. Included are interviews, musical demonstrations, rare archive & home movie footage, plus live performances to tell the story behind the conception and recording of these groundbreaking albums. Extras include additional interviews and demonstrations not included in the broadcast version, 2 full performances from the Roxy in 1973 and Saturday Night Live in 1976, and new full live performance done specially for these Classic Albums.
An unlikely team of activists and innovators hatches a bold mission to save endangered species.
One Nine Nine Four is a documentary film written and directed by Jai Al-Attas, "exploring the birth, growth and eventual tipping point of punk rock during the 90s" . The bulk of the film's content consists of band interviews and archive footage. The film is narrated by skateboarder Tony Hawk and features interviews and footage of various bands and figures in the punk scene including Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, Dexter Holland from The Offspring, Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion, Tim Armstrong, Matt Freeman (previously of Operation Ivy) and Lars Fredriksen from Rancid, Fat Mike from NOFX as well as Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge from Blink-182 .
The film explores the image of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu using unknown official footage from the Romanian National Television and National Film Archives.
The story of the Great War told from a unique new aerial perspective. Featuring two remarkable historical finds, including a piece of archive footage filmed from an airship in summer 1919, capturing the trenches and battlefields in a way that has rarely been seen before. It also features aerial photographs taken by First World War pilots - developed for the first time in over ninety years - that show not only the devastation inflicted during the fighting, but also quirks and human stories visible only from above.
Wish You Were Here, released in September 1975, was the follow up album to the globally successful The Dark Side Of The Moon and is cited by many fans, as well as band members Richard Wright and David Gilmour, as their favorite Pink Floyd album. On release it went straight to Number One in both the UK and the US and topped the charts in many other countries around the world. This program tells the story of the making of this landmark release through new interviews with Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason and archive interviews with the late Richard Wright. Also featured are sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson, guest vocalist Roy Harper, front cover burning man Ronnie Rondell and others involved in the creation of the album. In addition, original recording engineer Brian Humphries revisits the master tapes at Abbey Road Studios to illustrate aspects of the songs construction.
Wim Wenders says, "If in our century something sacred still existed⦠if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. He made fifty-four films. Silent films in the Twenties, black-and-white films in the Thirties and Forties, and finally colour films until his death on December 12th, 1963, on his sixtieth birthday. Ozu's work does not need my praise and such a sacred treasure of the cinema could only reside in the realm of the imagination. And so, my trip to Tokyo was in no way a pilgrimage. I was curious as to whether I still could track down something from this time, whether there was still anything left of this work. Images perhaps, or even people⦠Or whether so much would have changed in Tokyo in the twenty years since Ozu's death that nothing would be left to find.
Memory mechanisms are mysterious: we only see the stories we choose in order to construct our own reality. Every mark is a message in time, the invocation of an absence. To travel in the memory is to walk in time, zigzagging, a long road permeated by a dark, indecipherable logic⦠if we could choose seven moments to sum up our entire life, which ones would they be? The Dance of the Memory is a documentary-essay that guides us in that autobiographical search, where image and memory intertwine. It mixes archive material with an aesthetic and subjective tone.
Budo: The Art of Killing is an award winning 1978 Japanese martial arts documentary created and produced by Hisao Masuda and financed by The Arthur Davis Company. Considered a cult classic, the film is a compilation of various Japanese martial art demonstrations by several famous Japanese instructors such as Gozo Shioda, Taizaburo Nakamura and Teruo Hayashi. Martial arts featured in the film include: Karate, Aikido, Kendo, Sumo, and Judo among others.
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