Eight Free Films by Dziga Vertov, Creator of Soviet Avant-Garde Documentaries

in Film | September 14th, 2014

Has any filmmaker, of any era, had more influence on documentaries than Dziga Vertov? We know the early 20th-century Soviet cinema theorist and director of avant-garde non-fiction films has a place high in the documentary pantheon by virtue of his 1929 Man with a Movie Camera alone.

We’ve previously featured that motion picture’s rise to Sight and Sound’s designation of the eighth greatest of all time, and if you didn’t watch it free online then, you can do so above now. Just after that, we featured his unsettling Soviet Toys, the first animated film ever made in that then-nation. But given that the age of Vertov’s work — not that time has diminished its aesthetic relevance or excitement — has brought it into the public domain, why stop there?

Today we offer a roundup of all the Dziga Vertov movies currently viewable free online, a collection that allows you to watch and judge for yourself whether he and his collaborators succeeded in making a dent in what he called “the film drama, the Opium of the people.” Despite the thoroughly low-tech nature of these pictures, even by documentary standards, you may find yourself moved after having watched them — not necessarily by the Soviet causes he sometimes extolled, but by his cinematic rallying cry: “Down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios. Long live life as it is!”

Kino Eye (1924) Vertov’s first documentary not made from found footage journeys, according to a contemporary newspaper, “from the Pioneer camp, through the peasant courtyards, through the fields, through the markets and slums of the town, with an ambulance car to a dying man, from there to workers’ sports grounds, and so on and so forth, peering into all the little corners of social life.”
Soviet Toys (1924) A “cartoon” that, in the words of our own Jonathan Crow, “displays [Vertov’s] knack for making striking, pungent images,” “yet those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Soviet policy of the 1920s might find the movie — which is laden with Marxist allegories — really odd.”
Kino-Pravda #21 (1925) Also known as Lenin Kino-Pravda, “a special, longer-than-usual issue of [newsreel] Kino-Pravda,” as the Harvard Film Archive describes it, “in which Vertov jumps with boldness and ease between newsreel and drawn animation to illustrate Soviet Russia’s way up under Lenin’s leadership, the decline in Lenin’s health, and the year elapsed since his death.”

A Sixth Part Of The World (1926) A mixture of newsreel and found footage that, according to the Internet Archive, the film depicted “through the travelogue format [ … ] the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and detailed the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land,” making “a call for unification in order to build a ‘complete socialist society.’ ”
Stride, Soviet! (1926) “What began as a commission by the sitting Moscow Soviet for a promotional movie,” says the Harvard Film Archive, “was transformed by Vertov into something else entirely: a film experiment, an emotional film – anything but a picture that would help the Mossovet be reelected.”
The Eleventh Year (1928) A celebration of “the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution” which, according to the Harvard Film Archive, presents that decade of socialism “in the eyes of a left-wing artist of the twenties” as “a radical social experiment [ … ] required to be presented in a radically experimental way.”
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) “Made up as it is of ‘bits and pieces’ of cities from Moscow to the Ukraine,” writes Senses of Cinema’s Jonathan Dawson, it “remains a perfect distillation of the sense of a modern city life that looks fresh and true still,” “the strongest reminder that, in spite of the extraordinary pressures on his personal and working life, Vertov was one of the greatest of all the pioneer filmmakers.”
Three Songs About Lenin (1934) Also known as Three Songs of Lenin and Three Songs Dedicated to Lenin, a delivery of exactly what the title promises — but with a Vertovian stylistic slant.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Derek Jarman’s Jubilee: “It’s the Best Film about Punk” (1978)

in Film | September 10th, 2014

Derek Jarman was too old and too accomplished to be a punk. By 1977, the openly gay filmmaker and artist was already 36 and had an impressive CV that included doing set design for Ken Russell’s The Devils and directing Sebastiane, a landmark in gay cinema, notable for not only its frank depiction of the male body but also for its dialogue which was entirely in Latin. Nonetheless, Jarman gathered together notables from London’s burgeoning punk scene, including a young, lithe Adam Ant, to create Jubilee –the first and, arguably best, punk movie ever.

The plot, as such, centers on Queen Elizabeth I who, with the help of court occultist John Dee (played by Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Richard O’Brien), sees her land 400 years into the future. It’s a Britain filled with garbage and plagued with crime. Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, was killed in a mugging. As Queen Elizabeth I wanders around the wreckage of the British Empire, she encounters a bunch of leather-clad toughs including Amyl Nitrite (played by Malcolm McLaren protégé Jordan), Crabs (Little Nell, also from Rocky Horror) and Mad (Toyah Willcox, who would later go on to delight a generation of toddlers by voicing The Teletubbies). The highpoint of the movie is, without a doubt, is when Jordan performs a risqué dance to a glammed up version of Rule Britannia.

Jarman tapped into the same feelings of anger, disillusionment, and nihilism that the Sex Pistols articulated. As Jarman told The Guardian in 1978, “We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution — they no longer ring true.” Jubilee feels like a John Waters movie without the gross-out gags. A Paul Morrissey movie but with a clear sense of political purpose. It’s giddy, uninhibited, violent and occasionally quite disturbing.

Reactions to the movie were, not surprisingly, mixed. Yet the people who really despised the flick weren’t cultural conservatives as you might expect. They would fret over the film when it finally aired on late night TV in 1986. But in 1978, when the film came out, the very people the film was about hated it. Souxsie Sioux, of Souxsie and the Banshees fame, had a bit part in the film but nonetheless thought that it was “hippy trash.” Punk fashionista Vivienne Westwood hated the movie so much she made an insulting T‑shirt about it. And Adam Ant, who went to the premiere with his mother, initially thought the film was terrible. Jarman didn’t give a toss. “I don’t particularly want people to like the film or what it depicts,” he once told a reporter. “I simply hope that it makes them feel that something is going on.”

Yet over the years, the film’s reputation has steadily improved. Ant, for instance, has changed his opinion of Jubilee. “Today I think it’s an amazing achievement and testament to Derek Jarman’s persistence and ingenuity.” And historian Jon Savage, who literally wrote the book on punk, declared that “it’s the best film about punk, for all its failings.” British critic Julian Upton went one step further:

Jubilee is the most important British film of the late ’70s. Okay, it faced little competition at the time — just a weak trickle of ill-conceived co-productions, third-rate softcore, and the usual heritage and nostalgia. Next to those, Jubilee, then as now, stands out like a sore thumb.

via Network Awesome/ The Guardian

Wittgenstein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Tribute to the Philosopher, Featuring Tilda Swinton (1993)

Caravaggio, Derek Jarman’s Take on the Baroque Painter’s Life, Work & Romantic Complications (1986)

The Sex Pistols Do Dallas: A Strange Concert from the Strangest Tour in History (January 10, 1978)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Georges Bataille: An Introduction to The Radical Philosopher’s Life & Thought Through Film and eTexts

in Film, Literature, Philosophy | September 10th, 2014

Charles Baudelaire’s decadent visions pushed the Victorian cult of beauty toward modernism, Henry Miller’s lurid epics pushed a then staid modernism toward anarchic beat writing, and Georges Bataille and the surrealists of his arts journal Documents gave us much of the culture we have today, call it what you will if postmodern is too passé. Obsessed with torture, pornography, horror, and bodily fluids, Bataille “wanted to bring art down to the base level of other physical phenomena,” says surrealist scholar Dawn Ades. Where other transgressive figures of the past have mostly been tamed, Bataille, I submit, is still quite dangerous. The Bataille quote that opens the film above, A perte de vue (“As far as the eye can see”), won’t go down easily with almost anyone: “The world,” reads narrator Jean-Claude Dauphin, “is only inhabitable on the condition that nothing in it is respected.” This, the documentary suggests, is Bataille’s philosophy, one he defines as “a need for sensibility to call up disturbance.”

Bataille, a failed priest and sometime librarian, founded surrealist flagship Documents in 1929, published 15 issues, then went on to write novels, poems, and essays for the next thirty years. But his most famous work has remained his first, The Story of the Eye, originally published under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928. It’s a book that even today can seem like “social anthrax,” as novelist John Wray put it, in a way that other once taboo-breaking works like Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, certainly do not. It’s an apt comparison, not on literary grounds, but given that both writers were haunted by once fervent Catholicism turned to fervent rejection. Writes Mark Hudson in The Guardian, “he did believe in his own transgressive philosophies in a quasi-religious sense.” Like Joyce, “there’s a powerful dualism in his thought, a profound religious impulse.” Unlike Joyce—or Bataille’s fellow surrealists for that matter, who “excommunicated” him from the movement—“there is still much in his work that is difficult to redeem and far from being accommodated by the mainstream—if indeed it ever can be.”

You can read four of Bataille’s challenging pieces at Supervert’s elibrary: The Story of the Eye and three essays, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” “The Big Toe,” and “The Cruel Practice of Art.” Bataille’s philosophy, writes Supervert, “apparently lay in personal experience—in particular his childhood with a suicidal mother and a blind, syphilitic father.” This kind of psychologizing may seem superfluous, yet Bataille introduces himself to us, in his own words—through audio interviews in the first few minutes of A pert de vue—as the product of “a sad place to be.” Personal origins aside, Bataille’s philosophy has resonated widely and “helped pave the way to contemporary critical theory.” By embracing everything rejected, feared, or held in contempt, Bataille reclaimed everyday parts of human existence—those we euphemize or seek to contain—for literature, philosophy… and well, the internet. If some of Bataille’s preoccupations are irredeemable for mainstream tastes, you may find as you watch the film above and read Bataille’s writing that this is for good reason.

Michel Foucault – Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Documentary Explores the Theorist’s Controversial Life and Philosophy

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Documentary Profiles Nietzsche, Heidegger & Sartre

David Lynch Presents the History of Surrealist Film (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, the First Animated Movie (1906)

in Animation, Film | September 9th, 2014

August and Louis Lumière might have made the first film – a simple, static shot of workers leaving their factory for the day – but George Méliès invented the art form of cinema. Through his experiments, Méliès discovered that magic happened when he turned the camera off and on. People suddenly disappeared into thin air. Objects appeared out of nowhere. A famed magician, Méliès knew he was on to something. His discovery planted the seeds for just about every cinematic technique in the book — including animation. You can watch six of Méliès’ films here, including his landmark 1902 short A Trip to the Moon.

The person credited with making the first film-based animation, however, is James Stuart Blackton with his film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). You can watch it above. The short starts with the artist’s hand drawing on a chalkboard. Soon, however, the drawing starts to move on its own. The film is as primitive as it is fun. A man in a top hat blows cigar smoke into a woman’s face. A clown dances. Imagine the shock and awe of an audience not weaned on Pixar and Mickey Mouse watching a picture come to life for the first time.

Blackton started his career as a journalist and a vaudeville cartoonist. In 1896, he was assigned to cover Thomas Edison’s brand new invention – the Vitascope, an early film projector. Edison proved to be such a good salesman that Blackton ended up buying one. Soon he, along with his vaudeville partner Albert Smith, founded one of the first ever movie studios — the American Vitagraph Company. The company eventually became known for creating some of the first movie adaptations of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, but before that, they made short “trick” movies — flashy shorts to be shown during vaudeville shows. One of those movies, The Enchanted Drawing (1900) is essentially a filmic version of Blackton’s act with some cinematic sleight-of-hand thrown in. And as you can see below, it points the way to Blackton’s breakthrough with Humorous Phases.

In 1911, Blackton, along with his co-director, the spectacularly talented Winsor McCay, made Little Nemo, a movie that hints at the true potential of animation. Sure, their movie has way too much half-hearted live action slap stick, which pads out the running time to an over-stuffed 10 minutes, but the actual animation, which starts around 8:30, is utterly gorgeous. Watch it below.

Visit the World of Little Nemo Artist Winsor McCay: Three Classic Animations and a Google Doodle

Early Experiments in Color Film (1895–1935)

How Walt Disney Cartoons are Made

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Kafka’s Parable “Before the Law” Narrated by Orson Welles & Illustrated with Pinscreen Art

in Animation, Film, Literature | September 8th, 2014

On Friday, we featured Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” adapted in 1963 through the work-intensive but aesthetically stunning means of “pinscreen animation” by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker. But they hadn’t labored over it in total obscurity; the year before, no less solid a pillar of American film than Orson Welles had commissioned their work for use in his adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, another work of literature deeply concerned with the absurd. Critical opinion varies about the film, which some consider Welles’ best work, others consider his worst, and others still consider a mixture of the two.

It certainly remains one of his least-seen works, and yet it contains the most mainstream thing Alexeieff and Parker ever did. Very few deny the effectiveness of the film’s prologue, which combines images straight from the husband-and-wife team’s pinscreen with Welles’ unmistakable voice reading “Before the Law,” a parable from Kafka’s novel. Alexeieff and Parker’s images are still, rather than animated, which must have cut way down on the production time.

“Before the law, there stands a guard,” Welles intones. “A man comes from the country, begging admittance to the law. But the guard cannot admit him. May he hope to enter at a later time? That is possible, said the guard. The man tries to peer through the entrance. He’d been taught that the law was to be accessible to every man. ‘Do not attempt to enter without my permission,’ says the guard. I am very powerful. Yet I am the least of all the guards. From hall to hall, door after door, each guard is more powerful than the last. By the guard’s permission, the man sits by the side of the door, and there he waits.” These words establish the basis for not just The Trial, but seemingly Kafka’s own legal sensibility, and indeed worldview. The man waits for years, staring at the guard and lavishing him with bribes. He grows old and enfeebled. Finally, he asks why, despite the fact that “every man strives to attain the law,” nobody else but him has ever come to attempt passage through its doors. “Nobody else but you could ever have obtained admittance,” the guard replies. “This door was intended only for you! And now, I’m going to close it.” Welles then comments that “the logic of this story is the logic of a dream… a nightmare.” One understands why the director, who endured so many futile and absurd experiences in the entertainment industry, would feel drawn to such a fable. As for how he chose such appropriate imagery for it — well, maybe just good luck.

Watch Franz Kafka, the Wonderful Animated Film by Piotr Dumala

Kafka’s Nightmare Tale, ‘A Country Doctor,’ Told in Award-Winning Japanese Animation

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Before The Simpsons: Homer Groening Directs a 1969 Short Film, The Story, Starring His Kids Maggie, Lisa & Matt

in Animation, Film | September 4th, 2014

The Story (1969) is a cute short film about two kids, Matt and Lisa, telling their younger sister Maggie a bedtime story about meeting some animals, and an alien, in the woods. You can watch it above. The Matt in this film is none other than Matt Groening, who would go on to create The Simpsons. Their dad, Homer, made the movie. The Simpsons, as Groening admitted in an interview with Smithsonian magazine, is more than a little autobiographical.

I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, “Life in Hell,” for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing “The Tracey Ullman Show” for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show. I soon realized that whatever I pitched would not be owned by me, but would be owned by Fox, so I decided to keep my rabbits in “Life in Hell” and come up with something new.

While I was waiting—I believe they kept me waiting for over an hour—I very quickly drew the Simpsons family. I basically drew my own family. My father’s name is Homer. My mother’s name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. I was going to name the main character Matt, but I didn’t think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart.

Groening incorporated other autobiographical elements into The Simpsons too. For instance, the Groening family, like Bart and company, lived on Evergreen Terrace. In that same interview with Smithsonian, he all but admitted that the show is set in his native Oregon. And he even hinted that the names of a couple despised schoolyard bullies made their way into the show.

The real Homer, however, was very different from the donut-obsessed rube in the cartoon. “My father was a real man’s man, you know. He was a B17 bomber pilot in the War, stationed in England. So I grew up with this very intimidating, tough act to follow,” Groening told the Telegraph. “The nice thing was that he would leave his pens out for me to play with. But then he was not particularly approving of what I came up with.”

And while the early episodes of the Simpsons, which show Homer being perpetually irritated by his smart aleck son, hints at the complicated relationship Groening had with his father, he also credits him – and the movie above in particular – for inspiring his hugely successful show.

He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and, in 1963, he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals. I told it to my sister Lisa, and she in turn told it to my sister Maggie. My father recorded the telling of the story by Lisa to Maggie, and then he used it as the soundtrack to a movie. So the idea of dramatizing the family—Lisa, Maggie, Matt—I think was the inspiration for doing something kind of autobiographical with “The Simpsons.” There is an aspect of the psychodynamics of my family in which it makes sense that one of us grew up and made a cartoon out of the family and had it shown all over the world.

via Laughing Squid/Dangerous Minds

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Derek Jarman Creates Pioneering Music Videos for The Smiths, Marianne Faithfull & the Pet Shop Boys

in Film, Music | September 4th, 2014

Today we think of music videos, perhaps quaintly and not always correctly, as the cradle of modern Hollywood’s sense-overloading, logic-sacrificing, teen-targeting, “quick-cut” style. But the medium, especially in its formative years, offered a wide-open canvas not just to hacks, but to auteurs as well. Case in point: the British director, artist, and writer Derek Jarman, well known for features like Caravaggio, The Last of England, and Blue, but maybe even better-known, depending on which circles you run in, for his short films meant to promote songs from a variety of musical-cultural figures: The Smiths, Marianne Faithfull, the Pet Shop Boys, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Bryan Ferry. At the top of the post, we see Jarman pushing the boundaries of the music video, intentionally or unintentionally, as early as 1979, with a 12-minute visual suite interpreting not one but three of Faithfull’s songs.

Jarman goes a minute longer just above for another, 1986 three-parter: The Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead,” “Panic,” and “There is a Light that Never Goes Out,” songs which allow him to fully exercise his penchant for nostalgia-saturated styles of footage and acid criticism of the direction of England. He would also collaborate with his equally satirical countrymen the Pet Shop Boys in the late 1980s and early 1990s on no fewer than four separate videos, two of which, both from 1987, appear below: “Rent” and “It’s a Sin.” What’s more, he directed their 1989 live tour, which featured not only elaborate costumes but whole new short films projected onstage. With his combination of theatrical sense and interest in abstract visual expression, Jarman must have seemed a perfect fit for such an aesthetically minded outfit as the Pet Shop Boys. Those qualities also placed him well to define the nature of the music video itself — in which, at its best, we can still detect his influence today.

Rent

It’s a Sin

via Network Awesome

Watch Caravaggio, Derek Jarman’s Take on the Baroque Painter’s Life, Work & Romantic Complications (1986)

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talking Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dynamite

Tim Burton Shoots Two Music Videos for The Killers

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Quentin Tarantino Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

in Film, Music | September 3rd, 2014

To some directors, the music heard in their films seems as (or more) important than the images seen or the dialogue spoken. Maybe you’d make that case about Jim Jarmusch after reading — or, more to the point, hearing — our post on the music in his movies. And surely many Quentin Tarantino fans would regard a Reservoir Dogs without “Stuck in the Middle with You” or a Pulp Fiction without “Misirlou” as not Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction at all. In the booklet that comes with The Tarantino Connection, a collection of soundtrack songs from Tarantino’s movies, Tarantino describes his perhaps unsurprisingly musically-inspired method of film conception as follows: “One of the things I do when I am starting a movie, when I’m writing a movie or when I have an idea for a film is, I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie. Then, ‘boom,’ eventually I’ll hit one, two or three songs, or one song in particular, ‘Oh, this will be a great opening credit song.’ ” Hence his use of Dick Dale, the “King of Surf Guitar,” for the opening credits of Pulp Fiction.

“Having ‘Misirlou’ as your opening credits is just so intense,” writes Tarantino. “It just says, ‘You are watching an epic, you are watching this big old movie just sit back.’ It’s so loud and blearing at you, a gauntlet is thrown down that the movie has to live up to.’ ” He goes on to describe the taking of songs and arranging them in a certain sequence in a movie as “just about as cinematic a thing as you can do. You are really doing what movies do better than any other art form; it really works in this visceral, emotional, cinematic way that’s just really special.” And did he already know, as he set Reservoir Dogs’ un-unseeable ear-slicing scene to that mellow, then twenty-year-old hit from Stealers Wheel, that “when you do it right and you hit it right then the effect is you can never really hear this song again without thinking about that image from the movie”? Certainly his use of Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” has fused the song with Jackie Brown and not the eponymous 1972 picture for which Womack originally wrote it. And who has Kill Bill and doesn’t associate it with Nancy Sinatra’s version of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”? “I don’t know if Gerry Rafferty [a member of Stealers Wheel] necessarily appreciated the connotations that I brought to ‘Stuck in the Middle with You,’ ” Tarantino adds. “There is a good chance he didn’t.” But when it comes to understanding a song’s cinematic potential, Tarantino has long since proven he knows what he’s doing.

Across 110th Street

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

via That Eric Alper

The Power of Food in Quentin Tarantino’s Films

The Best of Quentin Tarantino: Celebrating the Director’s 50th Birthday with our Favorite Videos

Jim Jarmusch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Eight Free Films by Dziga Vertov, Creator of Soviet Avant-Garde Documentaries

Derek Jarman’s Jubilee: “It’s the Best Film about Punk” (1978)

Georges Bataille: An Introduction to The Radical Philosopher’s Life & Thought Through Film and eTexts

Watch Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, the First Animated Movie (1906)

Kafka’s Parable “Before the Law” Narrated by Orson Welles & Illustrated with Pinscreen Art

Before The Simpsons: Homer Groening Directs a 1969 Short Film, The Story, Starring His Kids Maggie, Lisa & Matt

Derek Jarman Creates Pioneering Music Videos for The Smiths, Marianne Faithfull & the Pet Shop Boys

Quentin Tarantino Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

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