New Arrivals
Kick that habit
Made in 1988/89 (16mm), a film around Voice Crack (Andy Guhl, Norbert Möslang + Knut Remond) in trheir daily work. A great film now on DVD!
FLicKeR
“Really, I think, behind everything, he was trying to teach people to see differently.” Genesis P-Orridge, on Brion Gysin...This award-winning documentary about poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin, portrays the life and legacy of an artist who believed art could revolutionize human consciousness. FLicKeR chronicles Gison’s complex ideas, friendships and influence with some of the 20th century’s key counterculture figures, such as William Burroughs, Kurt Corbain and Marianne Faithfu…
From Straight To Bizarre
Subtitled: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper And LA's Lunatic Fringe. "Desperate to remove himself from his original deal with Verve Records, in 1968 Frank Zappa set up the Bizarre and Straight labels in league with manger Herb Cohen, and so began a string of releases which remain extraordinary in the extreme. This film revisits and reviews the astonishing music that came out on Bizarre and Straight, and reveals the background, operations and, crucially, the lives of the musicians, performer…
Soundtracks
Richmond-based artist and musician Stephen Vitiello transforms environments with the physicality of sound. His installations have been presented in New York's Whitney Museum, London's Museum 52, Paris' Cartier Foundation, and dozens of other sites around the globe. His music has been released by labels like 12k, New Albion, and Sub Rosa, and has included collaborations with Machinefabriek, Lawrence English, Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, and Anduin. This DVD, however, is his first commerciall…
An Evening Of Dance Constructions
In the spring of 1961 Simone Forti presented a program titled Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things in a concert series organized by her friend, composer La Monte Young, at the New York loft studio of Yoko Ono. These radically new dances created circumstances for the performers' direct, non-stylistic actions. Each of the pieces was performed in a different place in the loft, with the audience moving from location to location to view them. Some of the pieces required elementary structure…
Maurice Lemaitre
Maurice Lemaître is amongst one of the most important and creative artists of the second half of the 20th century. His cinematic work has led to a fundamental questioning of the relationship between film and spectator, image and sound, art and criticism, cinema and other types of images. His art is characterized by its inventiveness, it's joy of creating, and a radical and loud critique allowing for Lettrism to flourish as an avant-garde movement.OUR STARS A chronicle of the fantasies and dream …
A History Lesson Part 1: Punk Rock in Los Angeles in 1984
Videographer Dave Travis grew up in Los Angeles where his dad worked as a cameraman for NBC and CBS news as well as TV shows such as “Chips” and “Fantasy Island.” When he was 15 his dad handed down to him an old video camera and he began shooting punk rock shows in Los Angeles. He eventually became a freelance video editor, working on projects such as Black Flag’s “Slip It In” video as director and editor, “1991 the Year Punk Broke” featuring Sonic Youth and Nirvana as editor, the Kurt C…
III Tagofest
Filmed during the 3rd edition of a most important independent festival in Italy: Tagofest @ Tagomago (Massa-Italy). With: afraid!, airportman, almandino quite deluxe, be invisible now!, dadamatto, fuzz orchestra, harschcore, i/o, jealousy party, larsen lombriki, miranda, musica da cucina, ovo, tiger!shit!tiger!tiger!, with love.
Disintegration loop 1.1
Disintegration Loop 1.1 consists of one static shot of lower Manhattan billowing smoke during the last hour of daylight on September 11th, 2001, set to the decaying pastoral tape loop Basinski had recorded in August, 2001. Shot from Basinski's roof in Williamsburg Brooklyn, this is an actual documentary of how he and his neighbors witnessed the end of that fateful day. It is a tragically beautiful cinema verite elegy dedicated to those who perished in the atrocities of September 11th, 2001
135 Grand Street, New York, 1979
AMAZING!!! Dug out of storage after 30 years in a basement, Soul Jazz present '135 Grand Street New York 1979', Ericka Beckman's thrilling document of downtown New York during the infamous No Wave period of late 1970s. Over 60 minutes she features better known names like Rhys Chatham and the legendary Ut next to lesser known but no less intriguing acts like A Band, Chinese Puzzle and the brilliant Youth In Asia. On 8mm film she captures the raw energy of a scene in the ascendant, in flux b…
Fuck You: Fucking Noise in China Now
Fuck You: Fucking Noise In China Now is a film made by Dominique Lohlé and Guy-Marc Hinant from Sub Rosa -- 100 minutes of electronic noise music and harsh speeches -- a road movie between Beijing and Shanghai. Featuring artists Torturing Nurse, Wang Changcun, Wang Fan, Li Jian Hung/Dickson Dee, the poet Sun Meng Jin and Zbigniew Karkowski. 100 minutes. In English with French subtitles. Double-sided DVD in both NTSC & PAL formats, region free. "We went on a trip, with a vision that may …
Words Of Advice: William S. Burroughs On The Road
In 1983, the counter culture icon and author of the cult classic Naked Lunch (1959), William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), traveled throughout Scandinavia making a series of personal appearances. Twenty years later, filmmakers Lars Movin and Steen Moller Rasmussen found never-before-seen footage of his Copenhagen visit and set out on the road to record new material, telling the story of the acclaimed author's later work -- especially what is known as The Last Trilogy -- and his unique perform…
Rapture adrenaline
Originally released on a limited critically acclaimed VHS edition, this succulent re-issue present an exclusive extra, WELCOME TO CANDYLAND, an interview with the author and, at the same time, an exciting voyage through some cult virtual-hyper-reality-simulacro. The OJ chase, Hollywood forever cemetery, Dr. Phil are just some ingredients of this delicious visual trippy cake. The movie RAPTURE ADRENALINE is an educational mixtape program, a cyber marine combat training video designed through…
Experimental Films (1943-1959)
"From the early 1940's until her death in 1961, Maya Deren evoked and exemplified the American avant-garde movement virtually by herself. Her first film, Meshes Of The Afternoon, set the tone for the decade and linked the movement to the older European avant-garde films of Cocteau and Bunuel". -- Cecil Starr, The New York Times. "Intensely personal, symbolic and surreal films that reveal her deepest, darkest fantasies. She's Fellini and Bergman wrapped in one gloriously possessed body. Watching …
Rewriter
2009 release. Subtitled: Early (conceptual) photographs, (expanded) films, (body) videos and (contextual) works, 1964-1975. "This video archive with accompanying essays traces internationally-renowned media and conceptual artist Peter Weibel's artistic developments from his beginnings through 1979. Weibel started out in 1964 as a visual poet, and was soon transferring the structures of the visual culture from the page to the screen, while still retaining the model of language as one of perceptio…
4 American composers
Produced by Revel Guest. Directed by Peter Greenaway. New York, N.Y.: Mystic Fire Video, 1991. Originally produced by Transatlantic Films in 1985. Vol. 1: John Cage. Vol. 2: Philip Glass. Vol. 3: Meredith Monk. Vol. 4: Robert Ashley. 'Based on London performances under the aegis of the New York/Almeida Festival, this set of four one-hour documentaries, originally produced in 1983, introduced these avant-garde composers and their music to general audiences. Compared to Meredith Monk and Rob…
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This untitled work presents the first digital collection of visual work by the collaborative artists Sandra GIBSON and Luis RECODER, and what may be described as a 'site specific' musical composition by Olivia BLOCK. The footage documents a version of a performance piece that was later presented and experienced as an installation. An earlier, different incarnation of this work was premiered at the Kill Your Timid Notion festival located in Dundee, Scotland, in 2006.' SoSeditions. 'Special note m…
This World Is Unreal Like A Snake In A Rope
A film by Robert Millis. Folk cinema from the eternal never-ending collage that is India. A journey through the ancient Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, street music, festivals, nagaswaram improvisations, impossibly loud cities, ancient temples, processions, devotions, decay, fireworks, abstractions and more. India is impossible to know: it is impossibly old and impossibly new, impossibly rich and impossibly poor, quiet and chaotic. Offered here is on…
Ström
Ström is a 45 minute piece for five loudspeakers, live-electronics and live-video, based on an openminded, artistic approach towards electricity. The piece is an attempt to transfer electric current via sound to the audience. The five speakers in the surround system struggle to take over the sonic stream like electro-magnets. Sine waves and noises rotate at breakneck speed around the listeners, try to charge them with static electricity, and, as an ultimate goal, even make them levitate. The vid…
Seven Easy Pieces
Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is the first performance artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. To coincide with "The Artist is Present," Microcinema has released Seven Easy Pieces, a document of Abramovic's week-long residence at the Guggenheim in 2005, in which the artist spent seven hours a day performing one of five landmark performance art pieces by other artists and two of her own.Performance art is by nature ephem…