New Arrivals
Trimpin: The Sound Of Invention
Trimpin: The Sound of Invention is an amusing exploration of the sonic world of an eccentric creative genius. Artist/inventor/engineer/composer Trimpin shuns the hype and hyperbole of the commercial art world -- yet his freewheeling sculptures and outrageous musical experiments are cherished by museums all over the planet. Filmed over two years, this documentary feature follows the artist/inventor as he designs a 60-foot tower of more than 500 automatic electric guitars; builds an ensembl…
Live in Japan
"Live In Japan is the first official domestic live Boris DVD to be unleashed! The power, majesty and unique psychedelia that only Boris can deliver is perfectly captured in this stunning visual document. Professionally filmed on the last show of the their worldwide Smile tour 2008. Light dazzled eyes, cut off the view a lot of smoke, and making loud noise can destroy the delicate environment can monitor everything that is Boris.” (label)
'Evelyn Glennie - Fred Frith. Touch the sound'
Subtitled A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie, German director Thomas Riedelsheimer's exquisite Touch the Sound is nominally a portrait of the Scottish musician known as the first full-time solo percussionist. Glennie is certainly a fascinating subject. Profoundly deaf since childhood, she disdains the use of hearing aids and sign language, relying instead on lip reading and, more crucially, on the use of all of her senses, especially touch, to hear with her entire body. The film reveals …
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…
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 …
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…
Trash Humpers
In the Summer of 2010, the underground trend of 'trash-humping' JUMPED the NASHVILLE CITY LIMITS as the film Trash Humpers spread across the nation, screening in movie theaters, galleries, bars and grills and anyplace, really, indoors or out, that could draw a crowd to see the thing. Filmmaker Harmony Korine often accompanied the film, standing around and answering questions when he wasn't doing something else. It was something to see, but the only problem was, all you could do once you'd …
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…
Synchronator
Synchronator is a video and audio research project by Gert-Jan Prins and Bas van Koolwijk in an attempt to use a combination of current digital and analogue means in order to make more use of the characteristic visual qualities of such techniques. Included are the 2006 Synchronator video and nine new tracks. Original recordings were produced with the Synchronator device for PAL video. Although especially adapted versions of all tracks are included for flatscreen monitor, to properly experience t…
Divine Horsemen - The Living Gods of Haiti
Maya Deren takes us on a journey into the fascinating world of the Voudoun religion, whose devotees commune with the cosmic powers through invocation, offerings, song and dance. In 1947 filmmaker she received the first Guggenheim Fellowship for creative work in motion pictures based on a proposal for a film on Haitian dance. On trips to Haiti in 1947, 1949 and 1954, she shot several thousand feet of "Voudoun " rituals. The Voudoun pantheon of deities, or loa, is witnessed as being living…
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…
Max Ernst Hanging
"In this revealing documentary, patron, collector, and curator Dominique de Menil hangs the 1973 exhibition Inside the Sight, in conversation with Max Ernst, the 20th-century Surrealist artist. From installation to opening party, the events that transpire, as captured by filmmakers John and Francois de Menil, provide a rare and intimate glimpse into the process of making an exhibition."
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…
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…
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!
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…
Interstices
Through these interstices, when conscience — this present to one’s self — falls asleep; through this tiny little interval between two instants, something arises, something you had never thought of; The erring ways of thought; through the cracks thus created, we lend our voice to the characters that rule over an unknown existence. These sounds are too rich of all their possible existence…
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
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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…
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.