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Kenichi Ugana’s deliciously unusual film “The Gesuidouz,” a cinematic trip that defies conventional storytelling and musical storylines, combines punk rock with magical realism. This isn’t your average band drama; it’s a wonderfully imaginative examination of creativity, survival, and artistic expression that combines sardonic wit with unexpected emotional depth.

Hanako, a 26-year-old lead singer with an unusual mission, is at the heart of the story. She’s convinced she’ll die at 27, joining the notorious 27 Club alongside heroes like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, and she’s desperate to create musical magic before her self-imposed deadline. Her band, The Gesuidouz (meaning “guesthouse”), is a misfit foursome that specializes in horror-themed punk music, emphasizing raw passion above polished performance.

Ugana, known for his bold approach to indie filmmaking, has crafted a narrative that straddles the line between absurdist comedy and serious artistic reflection. When the band faces the possibility...

Gary Hustwit’s documentary Eno takes a refreshingly unconventional approach to profiling one of music’s most pioneering artists. As an experienced non-fiction filmmaker known for his engaging style, Hustwit understood that a traditional biopic wouldn’t do justice to Eno’s innovative spirit.

Eno himself insisted the film avoid familiar styles and push creative boundaries, mirroring his own boundary-breaking work. The result is a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience that continually reinvents itself with each new screening.

Using a specially designed generative program, Hustwit pieced together interviews, archival performances, and candid studio sessions into an ever-changing collage. While certain key conversations remain anchored, the order and flow of other elements morph with every viewing. No two audiences experience the exact same film. It’s an audacious technique echoing Eno’s philosophy of cultivating creative evolution through systems and chance operations.

Across his prolific career spanning musical genres and visual media, Eno...

Nicolas Cage has turned around his film career in recent years, starring in more indie films. He was recently seen in one of the most terrifying films of the year, Longlegs. Cage earlier starred in Dream Scenario, which earned him a nomination at this year’s Golden Globes. Cage’s script selection has been receiving praise ever since the critical acclaim for 2018’s Mandy.

Nicolas Cage in a still from Pig | Neon

Cage revealed that his experiments with his roles usually scared the big studios, which pushed him to the indie film scene. The Moonstruck actor must have realized that his role as a melancholic truffle forager in Pig would’ve never sat well with these big studios.

Nicolas Cage Likes To Try Different Things Which Makes Indie Films A Better Option For Him Nicolas Cage in a still from Mandy | Rlje Films

Nicolas Cage‘s roles in his recent...

In October 1973, John Lennon — the man who seven years earlier whipped the Bible Belt into the Beatle Belt by proclaiming the Fab Four were “more popular than Jesus”— came off uncharacteristically reserved when discussing his latest LP. “The album’s called Mind Games, and it’s, well, just an album,” he told Melody Maker. “It’s not a political album or an introspective album. Someone told me it was ‘like Imagine with balls,’ which I liked a lot. … There’s no deep message about it.”

Bizarrely, he was downplaying the record,...

Renowned opera director Yuval Sharon returns to The Industry, the company where he began his career, for The Comet / Poppea. The new piece is quite the mashup, weaving together Monteverdi’s 1643 opera The Coronation of Poppea and W.E.B. Du Bois’ short story The Comet. The work — composed by George Lewis with a libretto by Douglas Kearney — opens Friday and runs through June 23 at Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary at Moca.

“The juxtaposition of these two pieces allows us to create a kind of constantly shifting relational field between this baroque opera and a contemporary aesthetic,” Sharon says of his latest collaboration. “We’ve created a space for these worlds to bleed into each other, to somehow contradict each other and contrast with each other, sometimes resonate with each other, to rhyme with each other.”

Monteverdi’s Poppea focuses on the titular character’s efforts to become queen by convincing...

John Cale is on a formidable hot streak in his 80s. When the Welsh avant-garde legend released Mercy last year, it was his first album in a decade. But he’s already produced another gem with POPtical Illusion, a masterful tribute to his bleak imagination. Six decades into his career, Cale is making music with a renewed sense of urgency—he hit a creative turning point in the pandemic, in a frenzy where he wrote 80 songs in a year. Yet he’s reached one of the most adventurous phases in his ever-eccentric career.

Writer-director Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves is inspired by a spate of thefts from Los Angeles-area high school marching bands between 2011 and 2013, though the details surrounding the incidents are only acknowledged in occasional title cards. O’Daniel instead uses the real-life tuba thefts as a springboard to explore, and in artistically fertile ways, how the removal of an integral part of a structure affects the larger whole.

The Tuba Thieves is specifically concerned with the experiences of being a member of the deaf and hard of hearing community. O’Daniel, herself a member of that community, distorts and manipulates image and audio throughout the film, sometimes even dropping out the latter, to fascinatingly reflect the disorientation that one can experience with the loss of hearing.

O’Daniel’s approach to narrative isn’t so much casual as it is coolly ambivalent. There’s a wisp of a plot, and...

New York, NY, February 26, 2024 – The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will present the world theatrical premiere of Merce Cunningham: The Events at Dia Beacon, a 40-minute film drawing on footage from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s unique, site-specific Events at Dia Beacon in 2008 and 2009. The screening will take place on Monday, April 8, at 6pm, at the Library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center.

From 2007 to 2009, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company presented a series of Cunningham’s Events in the galleries of Dia Beacon. This film, edited by award-winning film director/editor Daniel Madoff, is a compilation from five of these site-specific stagings with footage from the dress rehearsals and live performances.

Says producer Nancy Dalva: “The film creates an entirely new cinematic event with linkages revealing the choreographer’s idiosyncratic methodology and acute sensitivity to environment. Cunningham arranged these multi-stage performances after careful site visits,...

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

— John Cage

Sátántangó’s first few minutes provide an unsubtle hint that we’re in for a slow and gloomy slog, though you would expect that from any film by Béla Tarr. The Hungarian master, currently retired (he insists), is an international star who never set out to make a crowd-pleaser, even if his primary characters are pleasure-seeking proles at large in the swampy ruins of the post-Communist Eastern European Bloc.

Sátántangó commences with a wide, stagnant shot over a muddy paddock, a congregation of cows rooted in puddles in the near distance. The cows are themselves pretty interesting to observe, especially as one or two appear aware of the camera. They saunter toward the edges of the frame, and the camera bestirs itself,...

Paul McCartney and John Lennon put so much extra work into their music sometimes that it’s remarkable. For example, they once turned the handwritten lyrics of a song from The Beatles’ Rubber Soul into a work of art. The piece soon fell into the possession of a famous musician.

Paul McCartney got high and made colorful art inspired by The Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul’

On the surface, The Beatles’ “The Word” isn’t much of a psychedelic song. It has more in common with the Motown music of the 1960s than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Despite this, “The Word” has hippie vibes. It proclaims the importance of love, which The Beatles would later do in their most popular psychedelic song, “All You Need Is Love.” “The Word” also paved the way for John’s high-minded solo songs like “Imagine” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

In the...

The Ally McBeal cast takes time to dance on 2023 Emmys and has quite a bit of fun doing so — to the point that host Anthony Anderson has to remind them why they’re there (to present an award). Calista Flockhart (Ally McBeal), Greg Germann (Richard Fish), Peter MacNicol (John Cage), and Gil Bellows (Billy Thomas) reunited where else but the bathroom set from the show. “I knew I drank too much water. I had to take my Spanx off. I had to put my dress back on,” Flockhart’s voiceover played as she looked in the mirror. “Woah, girl, you look good.” Then MacNicol, Germann, and Bellows all came out of the same stall to join Flockhart and dance, until Anderson reminded her she was there to give out an award. How could anyone blame them, though, when it was so clear how much fun they were having? It was short,...

The material details of the musical instrument larcenies that took place across high schools in south Los Angeles between 2011 and 2013 don’t transpire in filmmaker Alison O’Daniel’s audaciously experimental “The Tuba Thieves.” There’s no thorough investigation into who committed the thefts and why. Instead, she takes a more symbolic approach to look at how the events altered the sonic landscape of the players’ lives and of the places they inhabit. It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe it as an audiovisual anthropological study.

If there’s an actual protagonist in this formally adventurous effort, it’s the synesthetic dance between images and sound (or silence) and how these interactions inform our perception of the world, depending on whether you are a hearing person, someone hard-of-hearing or a deaf individual. These parallel experiences converge in a sensorial examination of Los Angeles built from a lyrically edited barrage of moments.

Family Law is a Canadian legal drama series created by Susin Nielsen. The drama series follows the story of Abigail Bianchi, a recovering alcoholic and lawyer, who is forced to work in her estranged father’s firm where her siblings also work. Together, the Svensson family handles the dysfunctional families of their clients as well as their own. Family Law stars Jewel Staite in the lead role with Victor Garber, Zach Smadu, and Genelle Williams starring in supporting roles. So, if you loved Family Law and are waiting for its third season here are some similar shows you could watch until then.

The Good Fight (Paramount+ & Prime Video Add-On) Credit – Paramount+

Synopsis: An enormous financial scam has destroyed the reputation of a young lawyer, Maia Rindell, while simultaneously wiping out her mentor and godmother Diane Lockhart’s savings. Forced out of Lockhart & Lee, they join Lucca Quinn at one of Chicago’s preeminent law firms.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017) is now showing on Mubi in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada. Ryuichi Sakamoto: async at the Park Avenue Armory (2018) is showing in the United States and Canada.Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda.I think the inspiration to make Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017) first came to me in April of 2012. Ryuichi Sakamoto had curated a series of performances at a space called the Stone in the East Village, and I went to see him perform there with the guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Otomo Yoshihide. The Stone is small, and the show was sold out. I was asked to sit on the floor somewhere between the two artists, literally close enough to touch Otomo-san's effects pedals and a leg of Ryuichi's piano—that's how intimate the Stone can be. As they explored the fringe between music and noise, their performance somehow evoked images of Fukushima in the aftermath...

Exclusive: Greenwich Entertainment has acquired North American distribution rights to music-themed documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co., setting an August 25 theatrical release date for the directorial debut of C.B. Stockfleth.

The film, an inside look at the influential underground music movement, premiered at Doc NYC last November and held its international premiere at Cph:dox in Copenhagen in March.

“In 1985, a group of Louisiana high schoolers began experimenting with whatever random instruments and gear they could find,” a description of the documentary notes. “This core group became the basis for a loose music collective that became known as the Elephant 6 Recording Co. and comprised bands Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, Elf Power and many others. Influenced by psychedelic pop of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and a lo-fi DIY approach, the bands that coalesced around the Elephant 6 banner epitomized for many alternative and indie rock of the ‘90’s.

Sam Green wants you to stop and listen for a second. Like, really listen.

The Bay Area documentarian wants you take in the world around you, one curated noise at a time. It might be church bells, cicadas, wind chimes, or rushing currents. He may throw a few sonic curveballs your way as well — violins could quickly turn into explosions, or Philip Glass gently noodling on a piano might suddenly give way to the extremely loud buzzing of a fly. Occasionally, Green will ask you to close your eyes, the...

“Hurt but not defeated.” That’s the direction filmmaker Martha Coolidge gave to her star Nicolas Cage as they shot the pivotal breakup scene in the ’80s classic “Valley Girl.” In a filmed conversation from 2003 between the two for the film’s twentieth anniversary, Cage told Coolidge that he has “used that direction ever since” in all of his work.

As the iconic ’80s spin on “Romeo and Juliet” celebrates its 40th anniversary on April 29, and Cage returns to the big screen with his latest film “Renfield” — in which he plays the centuries old Prince of Darkness himself, Count Dracula, recovering from the latest attempt on his life with his familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) in New Orleans — it’s clear that the impact of her words still resonate in the performances of the idiosyncratic actor.

He was just 17 years old when he auditioned for the role that would change his life.

Partway through Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s Personality Crisis: One Night Only, David Johansen muses on the irony of a VH1 special on one-hit wonders in which he was featured separately for his Animals medley, recorded under his own name, and for the immortal “Hot Hot Hot,” recorded as Buster Poindexter.

How can a person be a one-hit wonder twice over and also, as a founding member of the New York Dolls, the frontman for one of the most influential rock bands of the past 50 years? It’s fitting that Scorsese and Tedeschi have titled their documentary about Johansen Personality Crisis. Sure, it’s also the first track on the first New York Dolls album, but it’s still fitting because the documentary is a portrait of reconciled identity. It’s a connecting of dots between a member of a band, a solo artist, an alter ego and a man who,...

Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978).“The Levites shall then proclaim in a loud voice to all the people of Israel: Cursed be anyone who makes a sculptured or molten image, abhorred by the Eternal, a craftsman’s handiwork, and sets it up in secret.”My grandfather would have found an entry point in an observation about my height. “If only I’d been as tall as you,” he might have said from the head of the table while I helped my grandmother clear a plate. “Then I coulda had it easier.” That was a common refrain of his, one that, as my siblings and cousins and I grew older and bigger, allowed him to list with increasing starkness the atrocities he suffered but could’ve avoided—if he had not been so tiny. I probably learned about my family’s annihilation on one of these Friday nights, after the sun went down...

Dreams.Some of my favorite work at this year’s Berlinale engaged in some way with death or the afterlife. Lighten up, you say? Impossible. The most literal and beguiling of these was Lois Patiño’s Samsara, which ingeniously conjured the transitional passage between life and death, Buddhism’s intermediate state of bardo. There were the cinematic afterlives of lost films, excavated collections, and reimagined family albums; the archive’s perpetual reincarnation as a generative source for experimental and artists’ film. There were homages to artists from the past, whose legacies continue to inspire the present, including work by the recently deceased Michael Snow and Takahiko Iimura, and film tributes to avant-garde legends like Margaret Tait in Luke Fowler’s Being in a Place, and John Cage in Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move. Then there was the teeming, unseen world of spirits...

"He could see where all of this was going." Greenwich Entertainment has debuted the first official trailer for Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, a mesmerizing documentary that premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival a few months ago. Described as a "dynamic, moving portrait of the father of video art and Nostradamus of our technological present." A chronicle of the life and times of Nam June Paik, a pillar of the American avant-garde in the 20th century, who initially coined the iconic phrase "Electronic Superhighway," and is arguably the most famous Korean artist in modern history. Featuring readings of his writings by executive producer Steven Yeun. Forever changed after encountering avant-garde composer John Cage, Paik became a member of the influential experimental art movement Fluxus, which created new forms of art and performance, leading him on his greatest adventure. Find out everything about him in this fascinating, spirited...

Paul McCartney claims he almost got his bandmate John Lennon and his second wife, Yoko Ono, to meet before they met at the Indica Gallery. He knew the avant-garde artist before John.

Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono | Cummings Archives/Getty Images Paul McCartney nearly got John Lennon and Yoko Ono to meet before their first meeting

In his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul said he’d known Yoko since she’d arrived in London in the mid-1960s. Paul met her before John.

One day, Yoko knocked on Paul’s door and said, “We’re collecting manuscripts for John Cage’s birthday. Do you have a manuscript we can have?” Paul said, “We don’t really have manuscripts. We have sort of words on paper, a piece of paper with lyrics on it.” She said, “Yeah, well, that’d be good.”

Paul told Yoko that he...

Paul McCartney claims he’s the reason his bandmate John Lennon met his second wife, Yoko Ono. He met the avant-garde artist before John.

Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono | Cummings Archives/Getty Images Paul McCartney is the reason John Lennon and Yoko Ono met

In his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul said he’d known Yoko since she’d arrived in London in the mid-1960s. Paul met her before John.

One day, Yoko knocked on Paul’s door and said, “We’re collecting manuscripts for John Cage’s birthday. Do you have a manuscript we can have?” Paul said, “We don’t really have manuscripts. We have sort of words on paper, a piece of paper with lyrics on it.” She said, “Yeah, well, that’d be good.”

Paul told Yoko that he didn’t have anything like that with him but added that John might.

Germany’s Oscar submission from Edward Berger, Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” has become a true awards season powerhouse over the past few months, scoring seven BAFTA wins out of 14 nominations. Besides being nominated for Best International Feature (where it’s currently the frontrunner among Gold Derby Experts), the anti-war drama has racked up nine Oscar nominations total, including Best Picture.

Netflix has provided Gold Derby with an exclusive video of the “All Quiet on the Western Front” panel involving many of those responsible for the movie’s success (watch above).

See Oscar predictions in all 23 categories

Moderated by veteran journalist Brian Williams – former anchor of NBC Nightly News and host of NBC’s The 11th Hour – the incredible panel includes director/writer/producer Berger, co-writers Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, actor Albrecht Schuch (“Kat”), hair and makeup designer Heike Merker, composer Volker Bertelmann, sound designer Markus Stemler,...

A year ago, amid Coda’s groundbreaking run on the awards circuit, writer/director Sian Heder frequently expressed her hopes that the film’s success could be one of the “rocks that starts the avalanche” of the wealth of talent that exists within the Deaf community, heralding a new wave of deaf talent in Hollywood not only in front of but behind the camera as well.

Delbert Whetter

One of the boldest statements to portend such an avalanche comes through deaf writer-director Alison O’Daniel’s experimental docudrama The Tuba Thieves, which screened as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s “innovative, forward-thinking” Next program. Whereas cinema frequently portrays life for deaf and hard of hearing people as wholly divorced from sound and music, implying a tragic deficit in their human cultural experience, O’Daniel turns this trope on its head. Her cinematic journey of sound, music and silence deftly weaves...

Burt Bacharach was one of the most distinguished and successful composers of the last century.

Working most fruitfully with the lyricist Hal David, his addictively intelligent songs embodied unconventional time signatures, shifting chords and a fusion of pop and rock, jazz, and Latin elements. With Bacharach’s adventurous song structures married to David’s words, often bittersweet lyrics as though from a cinematic school of realism, the duo were like the personification of New York’s Brill Building hit factory.

Although not all these songs were with David, Bacharach, who has died aged 94, enjoyed more than 50 UK Top 40 hits, and more than 70 in his native US. A remarkable 38 of these tunes were with the classically trained former gospel singer Dionne Warwick with whom the pair began working in 1962. Several of Bacharach’s compositions were bigger hits in the UK than in America.

The pair first hit the charts in 1957 with...

“I use technology in order to hate it properly,” pioneering video artist and self-identified cultural terrorist Nam June Paik says while explaining his playful, boundary-breaking work. A Ph.D. holder who speaks 20 languages––almost all quite badly––Paik is known as the father of video art, fantasizing early on about converting the medium of television into something other than passive work. It often broke the rules, incorporating onstage nudity, politics (including the satirization of John F. Kennedy shortly after his assassination), and the embrace of the future. For Paik, a student who lived history––he escaped Seoul at the beginning of the Korean War to study music in West Germany in the late 1950s––it’s the artist’s role to think about the future.

Lovingly constructed by Amanda Kim, Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is a seminal biography of an artist often dangling on the edge...

I remember the first time I became conscious of Nam June Paik’s existence. I was still a high school student, starting to figure out my interest in art history. My teacher had assigned us to particular sculptures in the Samsung Leeum Museum to write about. Then there I was, at the tender age of sixteen, face-to-face with “My Faust-Communication, 1989-1991” – a Gothic portal enshrining a gridded stack of videos. Little did I know that this encounter would mark the first of many to come.

Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance’s US Documentary Competition. Its distribution is now handled by Dogwoof and Greenwich Entertainment, and the film will begin its US theatrical release on 24 March 2023.

It seemed like I found him in every art-related corner of my world. I ran into him in other exhibitions at...

Every so often, you’ll see a portrait-of-the-artist documentary that’s so beautifully made, about a figure of such unique fascination, whose art is so perfectly showcased by the documentary format, that when it’s over you can’t believe the film hadn’t existed until now. It feels, in its way, essential. “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is like that. Directed by Amanda Kim, it’s a tantalizing portrait of Nam June Paik, the revolutionary Korean-born video artist who, in the late ’60s and ’70s, did nothing less than invent an art form.

When he was first becoming famous, about 50 years ago, you’d go to see a Nam June Paik installation at someplace like the Museum of Modern Art, and it would seem quirky and exotic — a tower of stacked TV screens, all flashing what looked like the squiggly visual equivalent of feedback. It was weird and kind of gripping,...

The documentary Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, which explores the groundbreaking video artist’s life and work, is like nothing Paik ever would have made himself. It’s far too straightforward and chronological, far too concerned with presenting things in a clear and comprehensive fashion — whereas Paik spent most of his career seriously messing things up, whether he was doing it with musical instruments, television sets or live TV broadcasts distorted through time and space.

But that doesn’t mean director Amanda Kim’s first feature isn’t worth a look. For anyone interested in the origins of what we now call video art, not to mention mass media and the internet, it’s essential viewing. Paik was a true visionary who foresaw the virtual world we now live in, and Kim’s film chronicles how he channeled that vision through madcap sculptures and installations that took...

A film that rewards patience, The Tuba Thieves, despite its title, is not a quirky heist picture but rather a meditation on the presence and absence of sound framed by both recent and further-removed history. It’s directed by d/Deaf visual artist Alison O’Daniel, who crafts a rich visual and auditory project that’s probably best experienced in an acoustically perfect environment. One might at least need a high-end pair of noise-canceling headphones to simulate the optimal screening venue. Open-captioned by default, The Tuba Thieves is an immersive journey that perhaps approximates the trials of limited hearing with a structure that is either a cinematic meditation or frustrating for those seeking to impose some sense of order over the raw material we’re presented.

Often defying convention, we’re initially told the genesis of the film is a year-spanning string of instrument heists at LA high schools that very likely aren’t related.

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Cinema Guild will release “The Tuba Thieves” in New York City on March 15 with a national rollout to follow.

The captions that appear throughout “The Tuba Thieves” are generous, imaginative, and expansive, giving names to sounds we’re familiar with but have likely never thought to put into words. The sound of ocean waves is described as a “rush and fall.” A mop very specifically “smacks the floor” in the distance. Even when there’s no detectible sound, captions indicate that “air circulates.”

First-time filmmaker (and seasoned visual artist) Alison O’Daniel, who is hard of hearing, offers captions that are tactile, existing in a place beyond pure sound. In doing this, she de-prioritizes hearing audiences, asking them to tune into her work in novel and often confounding ways. At the same time, she centers her film around...

Nick Hakim seems to inherently understand the value of silence, of sparseness. The child of a Peruvian father and a Chilean mother, Hakim was born in Washington, D.C., and now resides in a quiet pocket of the Ridgewood neighborhood in Queens, New York, along the Brooklyn border. When we catch up over Zoom recently, he’s calm and composed, occasionally plinking his piano as he speaks. Near the end of our interview, the conversation veers toward legendary experimental composer John Cage. Hakim goes to his bookshelf, and shows me his copy of Silence,...

Dogwoof has picked up Amanda Kim’s documentary on the contemporary artist Nam June Paik for world sales, excluding North America and South Korea.

“Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV” is set to world premiere on Jan. 22 at Sundance as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition.

Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and invented the video synthesizer. He is credited with coining the term “electronic super highway,” which was the title of one of his most famous works that involved more than 300 TV sets.

The film will trace Paik’s life from childhood as he traveled across the world. He fled to Japan from his native Korea at the outbreak of the Korean War, before moving to Germany and subsequently to New York City where he settled in 1964.

The film will include...

Daniele Ledda is a musician, composer and teacher of electronic music at the Cagliari Conservatory of Music, with a curriculum full of experimentation, international collaborations and multidisciplinary artistic research activities. Clavius is the name he gave to a family of self-built instruments starting from the concept of “prepared piano” by John Cage, exploring the possibilities of fusion between analog and digital. The project has now given life to a LP/Digital album, “Clavius”, released at the end of September 2022 for Ticonzero.

We met him at the Cagliari Conservatory of Music, in a room full of vintage electronic keyboards and synthesisers, on the day after his live performance at the Across Asia Film Festival, where he accompanied with Clavius the screening of Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism (Yukoku).

We talked about working on Patriotism (Yukoku), the extraordinary figure of Yukio Mishima, the link between cinema and his music, the Clavius project and more.

In A Little Love Package, Vienna’s institutions, people, buildings, and overlapping epochs make for a stiff drink: a bright, effervescent, lightly intoxicating film easily downed in one. The director is Gastón Solnicki, a nicely ruminative Buenos Aires filmmaker whose make-it-up-as-you-go approach allows his films to meander. Solnicki’s work has a playful spirit: it’s episodic both in form and content, though never amorphous; and he moves between narrative, documentary, still imagery, and immersive sound with seamless élan. Forged in lockdown, Love Package is a breezy collage of meteorites and cigarettes; cheese and boiled eggs, and how best to make them. But at heart it’s about how eras end, what they leave behind, and how new ones begin.

Solnicki’s previous film, Introduction to the Dark, was his first based in Vienna; it opened with images of the Prater amusement park, where Harry Lime once tallied the merits of Switzerland.

Click here to read the full article.

From its first edition back in 1946, Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival been dedicated to celebrating the extremes of filmmaking, from the most avant-garde experimental through cutting-edge arthouse and political cinema to best of the Hollywood genre movies.

The filmmaking quartet that Locarno has picked this year for its achievement honors is a near-perfect reflection of this approach.

Here is a closer look at them.

Jason Blum

With his Blumhouse Production outfit, American producer Jason Blum pioneered and mastered a model of combining strict budget control (typically under 5 million per film) with tremendous creative freedom to produce global horror franchises, including Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Insidious, as well as fostering a new generation of directing talent, backing such debut features as Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, both of which earned Blum an Oscar nomination for best picture. Much studied,...

In this hour-long mix devoted to musician Tôru Takemitsu’s soundtrack oeuvre, the Japanese master’s varied body of scoring sounds and collaborations is in full effect, offering a spectrum of different emotions and genres.Takemitsu was a pivotal figure in modern classical music and much of his work continues to influence the contemporary canon today. Early in his career the composer was exposed to Western sounds while working a job for the US Armed Forces, and many of his groundbreaking compositions synthesized Western and Eastern sensibilities. Membership in the avant-garde Jikken Kōbō (an experimental music workshop formed in Japan’s postwar 1950s) led to an interest in and passion for the work of John Cage and concepts such as musique concrète, which can be heard throughout Takemitsu’s singular sound. Additionally, images of Japanese gardens, water, and the poems of Emily Dickinson inspired the tonalities of Takemitsu’s sound,...

The Locarno Film Festival will celebrate U.S. musician, performance artist and filmmaker Laurie Anderson with its lifetime achievement award dedicated to creative pioneers.

The prominent Swiss fest dedicated to international indie cinema will be feting Anderson with its Vision Award Ticinomoda, and screening her two feature-length films, “Heart of a Dog” (2015) which is dedicated to Lou Reed, and the restored 4K version of “Home of the Brave” (1986).

Anderson will be given the award on Aug. 10 during a ceremony on Locarno’s Piazza Grande that will be followed by an onstage conversation on Aug. 11.

Locarno in a statement praised Anderson as “an artist who has made inventiveness and experimentation the hallmarks of her career,” underlining that she’s been a leading figure in the U.S. avant-garde since the 1970s.

“Anderson has spent five decades exploring the potential of multimedia and innovative technology in the arts, through collaborations with William S. Burroughs,...

Humans have five senses, whereas cinema is limited to just two, sight and sound. We often hear how movies are a visual medium, but what about the other, invisible half? Filmmaker Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”) wants to get audiences thinking with their ears as much as their eyes, constructing an immersive, audio-driven essay film that focuses our attention on sound: how it works, what it can do and the way that specific noises can either unlock memories or spark entirely new ones.

Full to bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity, “32 Sounds” is a uniquely mind-expanding plunge into a dimension of the human experience so many of us take for granted, a rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives. “Enrich our lives?!” I can practically hear you asking. If that sounds like too grandiose a goal, consider this: Unless you’re a musician, an audio engineer or an otolaryngologist,...

Maverick artist Nam June Paik will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary that will highlight unseen footage and archival materials. The currently untitled production will be completed in 2022. Oscar nominee and “Minari” star Steven Yeun and hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy have joined the project as executive producers.

Paik is often referred to as the “Father of Video Art” and was a prophet of the internet, as well as a visionary and futurist. Adopting technology to transform the way we see the world, he was one of the first to use television as an artist’s canvas and invented the video synthesizer. In the 1970s, he coined the term “Electronic Superhighway” and predicted the future of communication in the digital age. He launched a series of the world’s first global satellite art events, bridging the gap between East and West, pop and avant-garde and all genres of art...

In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he tried and failed to convince his father and half-brother to do ecstasy with him in a hotel room. In I Am A Sex Addict, he recounted his addiction to prostitutes and the destruction that wrought on his romantic life. In The Sheik and I, he made an enemy of the Sheik of Sharjah and the film was subsequently banned in the United Arab Emirates. But Caveh Zahedi, the prolific cult filmmaker known for deeply personal documentaries that have been championed by everyone from Lena Dunham to Richard Linklater, reached unknown levels of depravity and self-destruction with The Show About the Show.

Its first season, which aired in 2015, started as a mind-boggling self-reflexive exercise wherein each episode chronicled the making of the previous episode using documentary footage and reenactments but eventually—particularly in its second season—devolved into a perversely entertaining documentation of his marriage’s dissolution.

For years, I’ve been longing for someone to make a documentary about the Velvet Underground. They are, along with the Beatles and the Stones, one of the three seminal groups in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. So surely they deserve to be captured and memorialized in a film that does them justice.

There’s a reason we’ve never seen that film. Every time I’ve raised the subject with those in the know, the explanation comes down to: “There’s no footage.” What they mean is: There are random bits of footage, and plenty of photographs, but if you want to see the Velvets in their prime performing “What Goes On” or “White Light/White Heat” in a steamy rock club, or get a taste of what it was like to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom in New York City in 1966, or to see...

The Residents will debut a special new performance, Duck Stab! Alive!, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the long-running alternative variety/music show, Night Flight. The performance will air June 5th on the Night Flight Plus app.

Duck Stab! Alive! is described in a release as a “contemporary ‘live-in-the-studio’ re-imagining” of the Residents’ 1978 album, Duck Stab! The performance was directed by video artist John Sanborn, who has regularly collaborated with the Residents since the Nineties.

Along with showing Duck Stab! Alive! the 40th-anniversary Night Flight special will include a marathon...

Spoiler warning: This article discusses the ending of “Sound of Metal.”

Here’s some Oscar trivia: Did you know that both times a film with the word “sound” it its title has been nominated for Best Sound (1952’s “Breaking the Sound Barrier” and 1964’s The Sound of Music”), that film has won the Academy Award in the category.

That’s a stat that bodes very well for this year’s “Sound of Metal,” starring Riz Ahmed as a drummer who loses his hearing, which scored six nominations, including in the newly-singular category of Best Sound. In previous years this craft was split between the disciplines of sound mixing and sound editing. In a category that’s aplenty with war epics and big musicals (as in the case of the above mentioned films), “Sound of Metal” offers something quite different.

“This is not a film with a lot of big explosions,...

Variety asked some of the behind-the-scenes artists about their challenges and joys working on the year’s most prominent films.

Nicholas Becker

Sound Design, “Sound of Metal”

“The most powerful scene in terms of sound is the last one, which ironically has none at all. Usually when there’s silence in film, the convention is to put a little hiss or something to fill the void, but Darius [Marder, director] bravely wanted there to be nothing, complete emptiness. And so when Ruben removes his implant and there’s nothing, the audience finds themselves amid an orchestra of air conditioners, noisy neighbors, or their own breath. It always reminds me of John Cage’s ‘4’33”.’ It’s a powerful moment for Ruben, but also for the audience, as the sound of the real world bleeds into the world of the film, tying them together.”

Erran Baron Cohen

Composer, Co-writer of “Wuhan Flu” Song, “Borat...

Harold Budd, the acclaimed composer known for his minimalist works and collaborations with Brian Eno, died Tuesday. He was 84. Steve Takaki, Budd’s manager, confirmed his death, adding that the cause of death was complications due to the coronavirus.

“A lot to digest,” Cocteau Twins frontman and frequent Budd collaborator Robin Guthrie wrote on Facebook. “Shared a lot with Harold since we were young, since he was sick, shared a lot with harold for the last 35 years, period. Feeling empty, shattered lost and unprepared for this. … His last words to...

There is no such thing as a casual Frank Zappa fan — it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. (Really, there’s no such thing as a casual Frank Zappa listener, period: You either immediately recoil from his grandiose, often goofy odes to dancin’ fools and yellow snow, self-promoting pimps and and S&m aficionados … or you end friendships arguing over which bootleg of his Over Nite Sensation ’73 shows is the best.) And on a scale from one to plays-in-a-Joe’s-Garage-cover-band, we’d put Alex Winter’s level of worship somewhere near an eight.

In “Sound of Metal,” Riz Ahmed stars as a volatile bleach-blond drummer named Ruben. He’s on tour with his girlfriend (Olivia Cooke), the lead singer in their heavy metal band, traveling to heartland gigs with all their audio equipment in an Rv. One morning he wakes up to discover that he is deaf. The condition, he soon learns from a doctor, is permanent.

Debut director Darius Marder (co-writer of “The Place Beyond the Pines”) envelops viewers completely in Ruben’s unexpected journey, which leads to a rural halfway house for recovering addicts with hearing loss. Ahmed, the British actor and rapper, brilliantly embodies the vulnerability and the resilience of his character.

His performance, destined to be much cited during awards season, was also shaped in tandem with Nicolas Becker, a French sound designer and musician who worked on the film’s daring, experimental soundscape, which immerses the audience in Ruben’s experience.

Ben Rivers's Ghost Strata (2019) and Now, at Last! (2018) are exclusively showing October and November 2020 on Mubi in the series Ben Rivers: As Time Goes By.Above: Ghost StrataOver the course of nearly two decades, Ben Rivers has been called many things: a portraitist, a documentarian, an experimental ethnographer—even, in his own words, an “accidental anthropologist.” Early in his 2019 film Ghost Strata, a tarot reader points to a less remarked upon feature of Rivers’s work: “All your movies are about you,” she says, suggesting an autobiographical through-line in a filmography rarely acknowledged for its personal aspects.While a rereading of Rivers’s entire body of work is a fascinating proposition, one might look to Ghost Strata and another film he shot the same year, Now, at Last! (2018), for evidence of how these personal elements have manifested in the British director’s recent work. In Ghost Strata, a diary-like...