Arts & Culture
From artists exploring and celebrating one another across disciplines — great Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura sees the cinematic in the innovative buildings of Renzo Piano, and Alain Resnais' short films on Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso's GUERNICA -- to films on erotic poetry and daily life, and the lives of celebrated opera singers in retirement, these are collections of films by and about people who see culture not as some convenient place of escape from uncomfortable realities, but at the very epicenter of urgent human concerns,
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Terres Barcelo
Directed by Christian Tran • Documentary • With Miquel Barceló • 2018 • 75 minutes
A major exhibition by Miquel Barceló, a Spanish painter and sculptor, at the National Library in Paris is an opportunity to delve into the work of this major contemporary artist. These imposing works, which work t...
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Lomax the Songhunter
Directed by Rogier Kappers • Documentary • 2005 • 95 minutes
Alan Lomax (1915-2002) devoted his life to recording the world's folk tunes before they would permanently disappear with the rise of the modern music industry. In LOMAX THE SONGHUNTER filmmaker Rogier Kappers follows the route that Lom...
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The Grand Masters of the Chauvet Cave
Directed by Christian Tran • Documentary • 2015 • 52 minutes
The paintings and drawings of the Chauvet cave – made 36,000 years ago and discovered 20 years ago in the south of France – are the oldest human artistic expression to date. Their strength and modernity changed radically all the ideas ...
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Films about Films
57 items
Go behind-the-scenes with these films about films. From acclaimed filmmakers exploring Bergman's remote Swedish home to Chantal Akerman dissecting her filmmaking process, these films pull back the curtain on the history of cinema, how films are made, and what they mean.
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Claude Monet in Giverny, Alice's House
Directed by Philippe Piguet • Documentary • 2011 • 50 minutes
For 43 years - half of his life -, from 1883 to his death in 1926, Claude Monet lived in Giverny. When he settled in his house in Normandy, a new life began for the painter. He embarked on an innovative pictorial adventure, developing...
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Ruth Stone's Vast Library of the Female Mind
Directed by Nora Jacobson • Documentary • 2022 • 77 minutes
After tragedy strikes, acclaimed poet Ruth Stone retreated to the margins of the literary world, working tirelessly to provide for her children, and transforming her intense grief into poetry, using simple, startling language.
Using a ...
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Secret Museums
Directed by Peter Woditsch • Documentary • 2008 • 77 minutes
Throughout the ages, erotic art has been created by some of the world's best-known artists, but it is rarely on public display. Whether it is held in private collections, or kept under lock and key in museums and libraries worldwide, e...
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Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story
Directed by Steve Sullivan • Documentary • With Frank Sidebottom, Chris Sievey, John Cooper Clarke • 2019 • 100 minutes
Frank Sidebottom was a performer who happened to wear a huge paper mâché head. Or he was a real person. It rather depended whom you asked. Either way, to his legion of devoted ...
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Draw Me Saint-Exupery
Directed by Andrès Jarach • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
On the 31st of July 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea. With this mystery, a myth was born.
Who was the man whose book The Little Prince was translated into more than 250 languages and dialects? Draw ...
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The Booksellers
Directed by D.W. Young • Documentary • With Fran Lebowitz, Parker Posey • 2020 • 98 minutes
Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet ess...
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Renzo Piano: The Architect of Light
Directed by Carlos Saura • Documentary • 2018 • 110 minutes
Carlos Saura celebrates the relationship between architecture and cinema as imagined by Renzo Piano, the Genoese architect who designed some of the most significant contemporary buildings in the world.
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Ronnie's
Directed by Oliver Murray • Documentary • With Ronnie Scott, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimi Hendrix, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Van Morrison, Chet Baker, Quincy Jones • 2020 • 102 minutes
Ronnie’s chronicles the life of saxophonist Ronnie Scott, a poor, Jewish kid growing up in 1940s East End, London ...
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Pollock & Pollock
Directed by Isabelle Rèbre • Documentary • With Sylvia Winter Pollock, Francesca McCoy Pollock, James McCoy, Helen Harrison, Peter Namuth, Terence Maloon, Dominic Gould, Rebecca Pauly, • 2020 • 82 minutes
The film tells the story of two brothers, two American painters: Jackson Pollock and Charle...
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The Way Things Go
Directed by Peter Fischli & David Weiss • Documentary • 1987 • 30 minutes
Inside a warehouse, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946—2012) built an enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long made out of common household items—tea kettles, tires, old shoes, balloons, wooden...
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Glenn Gould: On & Off the Record
2 items
These two classic documentaries show different sides of legendary Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould.
ON THE RECORD follows Gould to New York City. There, we see the renowned concert pianist kidding the cab driver, bantering with sound engineers at Columbia Records, and then, alone with the piano, fa...
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Edward Hopper
Directed by Ron Peck • Documentary • 1981 • 47 minutes
A study of the 20th century American painter's life and work.
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The Poets
20 items
"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”—Audre Lorde
Poetry can be a groundswell for bold ideas. This curated collection will expose you to work ranging from Marlon Rigg’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret),” which illuminates the difficult journey of livin...