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A captivating documentary about the rituals, myths, and traditions of Indonesia. Written and directed by Andrea Simon, this beautiful film incorporates Old Javanese poetry, sculpture, and music alongside performances by traditional artists and healers. Features exceptional footage of Borobudur, a Buddhist temple from the ninth century, and Prambanan, an important Hindu temple. Cinematography by Jerry Pantzer.
This enigmatic short film presents fifty Egyptian funerary portraits from the region of Fayum. Painted during Roman rule between 100 and 300 A.D., these striking, psychological works were executed in encaustic while their subjects were alive and later used to cover their faces after mummification. Narration includes excerpts from late Hellenistic texts including religious works and first-hand accounts from the dwellers of Fayum themselves, along with commentary from the art historian Richard Brilliant. A film by Andrea Simon and Bob Rosen, with music by Meredith Monk.
A haunting exploration in images and sound of bourgeois domesticity in post-Napoleonic Vienna, and its unavoidable path to romanticism and revolution. Music exclusively by Schubert (with one short interlude of Johann Strauss). Shown worldwide, prizes Europe and USA, in the permanent collections of many museums.
Buckminster Fuller: Everybody is an Astronaut
The visionary architect and inventor of the geodesic dome and Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, considered in an exhibition on his life and work. Produced with the generous cooperation of the Whitney Museum of American Art, this piece includes interviews with Fuller's grandson Jamie Snyder, curators Michael Hays and Dana Miller, and Curtiss Martin, a museum visitor.
Spaceships? Lanterns? A visitation from the Great Beyond? Steven Holl's 2007 Bloch Building -- an addition to Kansas City's venerable Nelson-Atkins Museum -- is the most insanely beautiful building in America. "Green tea and silence" will take an artist far.
Nearly twenty years ago, when I filmed this piece at Kehinde Wiley’s studio in Greenpoint, he had just had his first major show at the Brooklyn Museum and was perceived as a very young, promising master of traditional painting techniques who was able to magically transform them into stunning contemporary portraits. As we now know, on his way to the top he made some errors in judgement. Nevertheless, when I see this piece I’m reminded of his massive talent and personal generosity.
"Structure without coercion:" British painter Sean Scully on the inner meaning of abstraction. Produced as the artist prepared his Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, "Wall of Light."
A visit with Alex Katz, the man who re-invented realism in a cooler
postwar key. He's been painting his wife Ada since 1958 and they are
still the most glamorous couple in New York. A Jewish Museum
exhibition looks at these "non-psychological portraits," which Katz
says reveal influences from Japanese prints to film noir.
Homage to the fierce young Jewish poet who spent her brief time on earth fighting on behalf of her people and all the other Others. Because, as she says: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” WIth comments by novelists Teju Cole and Gish Jen, filmmaker Musa Syeed, Lazarus biographer Esther Schor, Rabbis Sharon Kleinbaum and Amichai Lau-Lavie, scholars Ed Berenson and Max Cavitch, Imam Khalid Latif. Commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Heritage to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, and explore the contemporary meaning of "The New Colossus." Produced with heroic collaboration from the National Park Service.
This is a film about pleasure—the indescribable pleasure of breathing out and letting go: serving your heart to the world on a plate. LIBERO CANTO maps this pleasure of process: that sense of being on a path, and seeing the chaos/fear morph into the deep pleasure of transformation. It’s a behind-the-scenes pre-history of performance: everything that singers do every day to allow the miraculous beauty and tenderness of authentic singing to arise. “Ecco il petto!” Here, take my heart.
Edvin Szamosi taught singing in Vienna and New York. The Libero Canto (“Free Singing”) approach was developed by his father Lajos in pre-war Budapest, where he was the cantor at the Great Synagogue. The Libero Canto anti-technique grows out of the insight that “your body knows better than you.” In each lesson, Edvin guides the singer with great gentleness and humor along the ragged edges of an unfolding musical process. The details of this extraordinary work are the heart of the film.
A polyphonic meditation on how memory -- writing, reading, documentation of all flavors -- shapes the Jewish soul. As historian Simon Schama observes: "Moses commands us to tell a story. And we can't tell a story without an archive. So, you know -- no archive, no Jews!" ZAKHOR was a commissioned work for the Center for Jewish History: a magnificent archive, museum and cultural center based in NYC whose extraordinary holdings (over 100 million documents) take you to many vanished worlds, from medieval Spain to Soviet Uzbekistan to Emma Lazarus' New York. And on into contemporary Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv! Well worth a visit, or three: check it out at 15 west 16th Street, http://www.cjh.org/
