Directed by Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode • Documentary • With Tilda Swinton • 2015 • 85 minutes
Tilda Swinton's hypnotic voiceover and a treasure trove of rare archival footage culled from hundreds of films from the 1880s through the 1930s-much of it previously unseen-combine to trace the anxieties of today's hyper-connected world back a hundred years. Then, too, electric media sparked idealism in the public imagination-hailed as the beginning of an era of total communication, annihilation of distance and the end of war. But then, too, fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality proved to be well-founded.
DREAMS REWIRED traces contemporary appetites and anxieties back to the birth of the telephone, television and cinema. At the time, early electric media were as revolutionary as social media are now. The technologies were expected to serve everyone, not just the elite classes. Human relationships would become stronger, efficiency would increase and the society would be revolutionized... But these initial promises were very different from what new media eventually brought to daily life.
Using excerpts from early dramatic films, slapstick comedies, political newsreels, advertisements and recordings of scientific experiments culled during years of research in film archives around the world, co-directors Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode unearth material that is by turns hilarious, revelatory, beautiful and prescient. The archival footage, combined with poetic narration and a virtuosic score by Siegfried Friedrich forges a cross-generational connection between contemporary viewers and their idealistic forbearers of a century ago.
"A lively, visually enthralling attempt to gaze into the future by remembering the past." - The New York Times
Directed by Derek Jarman • Drama • With Steven Waddington, Tilda Swinton, Annie Lennox • 1991 • 90 minutes
In this new restoration of the iconic New Queer Cinema classic, Derek Jarman offers a postmodern take on Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan drama. Pleasure-seeking King Edward II sets the st...
Directed by Cynthia Beatt • Documentary • With Tilda Swinton • 2010 • 60 minutes
In 1988 director Cynthia Beatt and the Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall to create the short film CYCLING THE FRAME (28', color, 1988). Riding her bicycle from the Brandenburg Gate to ...
Directed by Bartek Dziadosz, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth and Tilda Swinton • Documentary • With John Berger, Tilda Swinton • 2015 • 90 minutes
Prolific artist, philosopher, writer, storyteller and 'radical humanist' John Berger is the focus of this vivid four-part cinematic portrait. In 1973...