All Films

Some Call It Jazz: Herb Ellis Live in 1981

2006 • 37 min

This film presents a classic Herb Ellis performance from 1981, with Dave Maslow on bass. It also includes backstage interviews, biography, discography, and The Herb Ellis Signature 165s. Ellis, an excellent bop-based guitarist with a slight country twang to his sound, became famous playing with the Oscar Peterson Trio during 1953-1958.

Stephen Mackenna, or the Greek Occupation of the Irish Mind

2006 • 15 min

This video work forms part of a broader attempt to re-envision Irish cultural history in order to better understand the Now, to follow repressed lines of development that, if pursued, might have led Ireland out of its insular tendencies much earlier. The life and works of Irish writer Stephen MacKenna (1872-1934) form the documentary material on which the piece is built. MacKenna is best known for his translation from Ancient Greek of Third century philosopher Plotinus.

A Shaved Mint

2006 • 16 min • Italy

“Nevada Smith” was twisted to “A Shaved Mint” as I chopped up Henry Hathaway’s 1966 movie starring Steve McQueen and made a 15′ panning collage including every single frame. The original 125′ film counts 992 cuts for a total of 72 different scenes. Every cut has been separated, time stretched and fitted into the composition.

The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success

2006 • 2 min • Italy

First example of what I called DATA cinema, that is a movie server side rendered every day showing changes due to some data retrieved from the Internet.

Bits and Pieces About... John Lee Hooker

2006 • 27 min • United States of America

The blues legend John Lee Hooker was the last great King of the Mississippi Delta Blues, and his unmistakeable musical style made him known the world over. He spent more than half a century in the music business, received numerous awards and influenced various generations and world-renowned artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Pete Townshend with his music. This film shows an interesting American television interview in which he reviews his musical life, speaking, for example, of his album "The Healer". It is interspersed with excerpts from performances and music videos such as "Dimples", "I'm in the Mood" with Bonnie Raitt and "Chill Out" with Carlos Santana.

Dr. Teller's Very Large Bomb

2006 • 56 min

As scientists race to perfect the atomic bomb, Dr. Teller has a bigger idea.

A Sheherazade Tale

2006 • 22 min

A young man in Beirut's crime-ridden underbelly tells the story of his death.

Futurist Toys

2006 • 10 min • Italy

A working day of an "anyone" futurist man. The story, grotesque and ironic, takes her visual inspiration from Depero's futurist artworks.

nach den Bildern . FEININGERs Trio

2006 • 4 min

The recordings were taken in February 2006 in the Piano Salon Dresden during the CD production of "vor den Bildnern. FEININGER".

theEYE: Howard Hodgkin

2006 • 26 min

Howard Hodgkin was one of the world’s leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly coloured, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an awareness of history and an understanding of art’s potential today. Most recently, his interest in working in different scales, evident particularly in significantly larger paintings such as Americana and After Vuillard, demonstrates his concern to engage the viewer in new and challenging ways.

theEYE: Hamish Fulton

2006 • 26 min

Hamish Fulton describes himself as a “walking artist”. For more than thirty years he has undertaken demanding walks in many parts of the world, and drawn on his experiences to create distinctive artworks using text, graphics and photographs. He aims to “leave no trace” in the landscape, and he acknowledges that his art cannot represent the experience of a walk. “What I’m interested in,” he explains, “is presenting a sort of skeleton of something, and then the viewer fills in what’s missing, maybe from your own experience.” Although they exhibit a striking consistency in their concerns, Hamish Fulton’s artworks can exist as large-scale wall paintings and as modest publications, as graphics to compete with advertising hoardings and as online animations. They are informed both by spiritual ideas and by political questions prompted by our uses of the environment and by specific issues such as land rights.

theEYE: Dalziel + Scullion

2006 • 26 min

Artists Dalziel + Scullion have worked together since 1993, based in the remote north east of Scotland. Using photography, video, sculpture, sound and installation, they have created a collection of work that is recognised for its distinctive vision and sensitivity to its context and the environment. They are well known for their site-specific works, which include important public commissions, such as Horn, the giant stainless steel sculpture sited on the M8 motorway, which intermittently broadcasts poetry, music and voices at passing cars. They reflect on how these works illustrate the contradiction between the strange hybrid of wilderness and the high-tech, man-made industrial installations found in the remote landscapes of Scotland. The point at which nature and culture intersect is a continuing theme throughout their work, despite a more recent shift in geographical focus.

theEYE: Gereon Krebber

2006 • 26 min

Gereon Krebber’s proposal for a monumental and expensive aluminium object called Tin won the 2003 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Shot over more than a year, this film follows the creation, casting and placing of the final sculpture. Sitting in the elegant country house garden at Ragley Hall, Tin suggests a kitchen container or a hamburger and yet is at the same time defiantly abstract. Krebber is a young sculptor from Germany who studied at the Royal College of Art and now works in London. The surprising range of his work, and the processes which create it, are revealed here as he talks engagingly about how to create “seriously flippant” objects. His art, made with diverse materials including balloons and Cling Film as well as traditional media, has a unique deadpan humour. Its effect, the artist hopes, is to make you ”smile and shiver at the same time”.

theEYE: Lisa Milroy

2006 • 26 min

Lisa Milroy’s paintings are pleasurable and provocative, clear but complex, immediate and yet richly subtle. In 2001 many of her major works were brought together for an important exhibition at Tate Liverpool; this film, the first about her work, was made alongside that show. Her earliest works are depictions of everyday objects: shoes in serried ranks, collections of lightbulbs and household hardware. Later canvases explore the process of depicting images of people, blank facades of buildings, clichés of photographic landscapes. More recent work is looser and less apparently realist.

theEYE: Joe Tilson

2006 • 26 min

Since the 1960s, when he was associated with British Pop Art, Joe Tilson has enjoyed international acclaim for the individuality and originality of his paintings, constructions, prints and multiples. All of his playful, engaging work is informed with ideas from literature, philosophy, ethnography and alchemy. Tilson’s early work focussed on mass-market consumerism and politics. But he was soon disenchanted with mechanical methods of production and his art in the 1970s and 1980s employed hand-worked wood and metal in intriguing ways. Shot in and around the artist’s studio in Cortona, Italy, this film was produced alongside Joe Tilson’s first British retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

theEYE: Karl Weschke

2006 • 26 min

Karl Weschke‘s impressive, complex paintings picture the human figure and the landscape, the everyday and the mythical. His subjects include dogs and drowned bodies, creatures from legends and, increasingly in recent years, the monumental ruins of ancient Egypt. For more than fifty years, he has explored the possibilities of painting and its relevance to an uncertain world. Produced alongside a retrospective at Tate St Ives, with additional paintings from British collections, this film profiles the artist in the Cornwall that has been his home since 1955. Filmed in and around his studio and in the coastal landscape that informs all of his work, Weschke speaks engagingly about his rich, remarkable life and about many of his most significant canvases. Like his work, the painter is serious, intense, spare – and yet also with an appealing streak of mischief.

theEYE: Vong Phaophanit

2006 • 26 min

Vong Phaophanit showed his strikingly seductive Neon Rice Field when he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Like much of his rich and complex work since then, this installation exhibits a strong interest in language and light, in the painterly qualities of ephemeral materials and in ideas of cultural displacement. He was born in Laos, educated in France and has worked mostly in Britain since the early 1990s. Much of his work now is commissioned for architectural and environmental settings, including Outhouse in Liverpool. Created like many of his large-scale sculptures with fellow artist Claire Oboussier, this is a transparent glass house (with opaque windows) which serves as a flexible social space for the people who live in the surrounding tower blocks.

Gay Muslims

2006 • 49 min

An exploration of how many gay and lesbian Muslims attempt to integrate their religion with their sexuality, with a focus on five cases in particular. In some instances this involves suppressing their homosexual desires, leading an undercover double life, or being open about their sexuality and losing the respect and support of their families and communities.

Care Bears: Daydreams

2006 • 42 min

What better way to spend a lazy afterneen than daydreaming about your favorite furry heroes? now you can make a voyage to the wonderful world of care-a-lot and spend your day with funshine, cheer, share, love-a-lot, tenderheart, and all the other care bears.

Sarafan

2006 • 21 min • Russia

The film tells about ancient rituals and traditions, original rituals that were used during weddings and matchmaking... The evening before the wedding in the village of Pskov region. Black-and-white photographs and stories of old women - on the one hand; living rituals, traditions that have come down to our days – on the other. The picture is dedicated to a Russian wedding, but in fact it is about a moment, about the state of a girl's expectation of happiness.

Road Movie

2006 • 30 min

Recorded in 1982 by the band while on the road, the film captures both the exhilaration and the tedium of touring.

Sketches for Mozart

2006 • 30 min

Here, the camera goes into a dance, accelerates, becomes ornamental. This is not to catch something in a quiant dynamic composition but to realize itself as part of action.

Motherland: Cuba, Korea, USA

2006 • 41 min

How do we decide where is home? Feeling increasingly isolated in her adopted homeland, accomplished documentarian Dai Sil Kim-Gibson travels to Cuba to unearth stories from a relatively unknown group in the Asian diaspora. On the island, she meets Martha, a woman of Korean descent who identifies herself as Cuban. Like many of her contemporary countrymen and women, Martha possesses family ties that span multiple nations, cultures and politics. Her story inspires Kim-Gibson to travel to Miami to meet Martha's émigré sister and the rest of their mulitcultural family, in a journey that reveals how very different worldviews can co-exist in one family separated by place and ideology.

Vinyl Heaven

2006 • 23 min • Denmark

The film goes behind the counter in Copenhagen's used record shops and hears about the rare jazz, soul and rock vinyl records, which are necessary to preserve the great cultural heritage that has never been reissued on CD, and about the musical aha experiences and obscure acquaintances, which results from the hunt.