Based on Arata Osada’s book Children of the A-bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima (1959) the film retells the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of children. It mainly consists of illustrations drawn by the children.
Category: Documentary
Antonioni had a long fascination with India which gave way to this 1977 short capturing the country’s most important Hindu festival, Kumbha Mela, during which millions of worshippers gather to pray where the Ganges, Jamuna and Saraswati rivers converge. The film material remained unused until 1989, when Antonioni was convinced to edit it and to present it at the Cannes Festival.
This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists’ cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing art project for the emergent downtown artists’ community, Food was a landmark that still resonates in the history and mythology of SoHo in the 1970s.
Franz West (1909-85) remembers his youth in Vienna: the variety of the Jewish population of the so called Matzah-Island, his commitment to the worker’s movement of the Red Vienna and the rise of Austro-fascism and National Socialism. West’s masterly narration combined with impressing archive footage illustrate and elucidate the complex Austrian history between WW1 and WW2.
Africa 50 is the first French anti-colonialist film. It started out as an assignment requested by the French League of Schooling to show their students the educational mission carried out in the French colonies of West Africa. Once there, the director, who was only 21 years old, decided to film the truth: Lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples… The film was forbidden during 40 years and René Vautier was incarcerated for several months.
The first part of the film — popular science — tells of recent (mid-1960s) achievements in the exploration of the Moon. Scientists discuss the hypothesis of the origin of the lunar maria, about the temperature of the lunar surface and the supposed properties of the lunar soil.
The second part of the film — science fiction — shows how the Moon in the near future will be developed by people from a hypothetical first lunar mission to lunar cities and laboratories.
Marcel Duchamp kept a secret for over 20 years: while the art world had wrongly assumed that one of the 20th century’s most important artists had given up creating art, Duchamp was building his final masterpiece, Etant Donnes (“given”). Duchamp didn’t allow the piece to be viewed by the public until after his death in 1968. This left him shielded from the questions that developed after the piece debuted. Simply described, it is a peepshow. Through an old wooden façade, one looks through to see a sculpted open-legged nude lying in a field. The critics were stumped. What did Duchamp leave us with? This BBC documentary from 1997 dissects and examines the pieces of this assemblage.
This documentary respectfully interviews a number of important American directors who have in one way or another bucked the system. It also explores the life and work of earlier American mavericks through the tributes, reflections, and recollections of the first group. Prominent among the living directors interviewed are Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, and David Lynch. Among the directors who are discussed are Orson Welles, D.W. Griffith and Samuel Fuller. Clips from the films of these men, and interviews with important actors who have worked with them (e.g. Robert DeNiro) are another feature of this documentary, commissioned by Japanese public television corporation NHK.