Popular Documentary Movies on Kanopy - Page 234

A Museum In The City

2011

A Museum In The City

2011
In A Museum in the City, filmmaker Luc Bourdon invites us on a tour of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). A backstage discovery of the institution and its 150-year history, the documentary reveals the remarkable dedication of its staff and explores the contemporary penchant for music in the world of art exhibitions.
Rare Chicken Rescue

2008

Rare Chicken Rescue

2008
After a long battle with depression, Queensland rare chicken breeder Mark Tully is now on a mission to protect the endangered chickens to which he owes his life.
theEYE: Stuart Brisley

2006

theEYE: Stuart Brisley

2006
Stuart Brisley is perhaps best-known for his disturbing physical performances which pushed his body to extremes. But his work as an artist over four decades has embraced sculpture and installation, films and fictions, large-scale participatory projects and, most recently, the Web. Illustrated with archive footage and photographs, this profile of the artist explores his understandings of collaboration and community, of politics and the market, of humour and failure. At the centre of his diverse work are the essential qualities of what it means to be human.
theEYE: Karl Weschke

2006

theEYE: Karl Weschke

2006
Karl Weschke‘s impressive, complex paintings picture the human figure and the landscape, the everyday and the mythical. His subjects include dogs and drowned bodies, creatures from legends and, increasingly in recent years, the monumental ruins of ancient Egypt. For more than fifty years, he has explored the possibilities of painting and its relevance to an uncertain world. Produced alongside a retrospective at Tate St Ives, with additional paintings from British collections, this film profiles the artist in the Cornwall that has been his home since 1955. Filmed in and around his studio and in the coastal landscape that informs all of his work, Weschke speaks engagingly about his rich, remarkable life and about many of his most significant canvases. Like his work, the painter is serious, intense, spare – and yet also with an appealing streak of mischief.
theEYE: Joe Tilson

2006

theEYE: Joe Tilson

2006
Since the 1960s, when he was associated with British Pop Art, Joe Tilson has enjoyed international acclaim for the individuality and originality of his paintings, constructions, prints and multiples. All of his playful, engaging work is informed with ideas from literature, philosophy, ethnography and alchemy. Tilson’s early work focussed on mass-market consumerism and politics. But he was soon disenchanted with mechanical methods of production and his art in the 1970s and 1980s employed hand-worked wood and metal in intriguing ways. Shot in and around the artist’s studio in Cortona, Italy, this film was produced alongside Joe Tilson’s first British retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
theEYE: Gereon Krebber

2006

theEYE: Gereon Krebber

2006
Gereon Krebber’s proposal for a monumental and expensive aluminium object called Tin won the 2003 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Shot over more than a year, this film follows the creation, casting and placing of the final sculpture. Sitting in the elegant country house garden at Ragley Hall, Tin suggests a kitchen container or a hamburger and yet is at the same time defiantly abstract. Krebber is a young sculptor from Germany who studied at the Royal College of Art and now works in London. The surprising range of his work, and the processes which create it, are revealed here as he talks engagingly about how to create “seriously flippant” objects. His art, made with diverse materials including balloons and Cling Film as well as traditional media, has a unique deadpan humour. Its effect, the artist hopes, is to make you ”smile and shiver at the same time”.
theEYE: Dalziel + Scullion

2006

theEYE: Dalziel + Scullion

2006
Artists Dalziel + Scullion have worked together since 1993, based in the remote north east of Scotland. Using photography, video, sculpture, sound and installation, they have created a collection of work that is recognised for its distinctive vision and sensitivity to its context and the environment. They are well known for their site-specific works, which include important public commissions, such as Horn, the giant stainless steel sculpture sited on the M8 motorway, which intermittently broadcasts poetry, music and voices at passing cars. They reflect on how these works illustrate the contradiction between the strange hybrid of wilderness and the high-tech, man-made industrial installations found in the remote landscapes of Scotland. The point at which nature and culture intersect is a continuing theme throughout their work, despite a more recent shift in geographical focus.
theEYE: Conrad Shawcross

2008

theEYE: Conrad Shawcross

2008
Regularly using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross‘s structural and often mechanical sculptures question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitous within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his complex mechanised systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a ‘rasion d’etre’. From early works such as The Nervous System, 2002 – a monumental spinning machine that endlessly weaves a length of coloured rope into the form of a double helix, the shape of DNA – to his recent giant spiral work Continuum, 2004, the artist has attempted to visualize, among other things, the incomprehensible of human concerns, time.
theEYE: Sandra Blow

2007

theEYE: Sandra Blow

2007
Three spectacular canvases by Sandra Blow were one of the highlights of the 2006 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Sadly, this was her last show, as she died in August that year. This film was made in her studio in St. Ives as she was preparing to submit her works, and it captures her remarkable character and her fascinating reflections on a lifetime creating beautiful, rigorous, distinctive and joyous paintings. Sandra Blow spent a formative year as a student in Italy in the late 1940s, and she returned to London to begin a distinguished career dedicated to developing her vigorous abstract art. In addition to paint, she worked with a diverse range of materials, including sacking, plaster and coloured paper collages, and while her work often referred to landscape and to architecture, it was always exploring ideas of pure form and colour, balance and chance, light and movement. theEYE is an excellent introduction to contemporary artists and their work
theEYE: Hamish Fulton

2006

theEYE: Hamish Fulton

2006
Hamish Fulton describes himself as a “walking artist”. For more than thirty years he has undertaken demanding walks in many parts of the world, and drawn on his experiences to create distinctive artworks using text, graphics and photographs. He aims to “leave no trace” in the landscape, and he acknowledges that his art cannot represent the experience of a walk. “What I’m interested in,” he explains, “is presenting a sort of skeleton of something, and then the viewer fills in what’s missing, maybe from your own experience.” Although they exhibit a striking consistency in their concerns, Hamish Fulton’s artworks can exist as large-scale wall paintings and as modest publications, as graphics to compete with advertising hoardings and as online animations. They are informed both by spiritual ideas and by political questions prompted by our uses of the environment and by specific issues such as land rights.
theEYE: Gillian Ayres

2008

theEYE: Gillian Ayres

2008
Gillian Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946-50, before running the AIA Gallery with painter Henry Mundy whom she married. As a young artist in the 1950’s, Ayres was closely involved with leading British abstract artists including Roger Hilton. Ayres was quick to respond to European tachism and American abstract expressionism, creating a body of work that placed her in the forefront of her generation. In the sixties she was the only woman artist to be represented in the important ‘Situation’ exhibitions, showing large paintings combining oil and paint that aimed for the sublime using very radial drip and pour techniques of action painting.
Pretend Not to See Me

2009

Pretend Not to See Me

2009
Life and art intersect on a spectacular Newfoundland farm where visual artist Colette Urban mounts thirteen art performances in the fields and barns of her property. Resilient, determined, self aware and funny, Colette embraces the transformative power of art as she restages the significant art performances of her thirty-year career. With the camera as her audience she transforms the quotidian into a playful world of the imagination with elaborate costumes and idiosyncratic self invented rituals.
Burning Daylight

2007

Burning Daylight

2007
Burning Daylight is a dance/film project. The performance is set from late one night until dawn in a transit zone outside a notorious pub on a Broome-style Karaoke night. A series of contemporary dance scenes unfold expressing the...
Karlu Karlu: Devil's Marbles

2010

Karlu Karlu: Devil's Marbles

2010
We meet Warumungu elder Leslie Foster, senior Traditional Owner of country around this famous phenomenon south of Tennant Creek in Central Australia. Leslie shares the dreaming stories of the Marbles' creation, speaks of his 28-year struggle to regain rights over this land, and celebrates recent transfer of title over the Devils Marbles to Traditional Owners for share...
Histories of the Holocaust:Buchenwald

2010

Histories of the Holocaust:Buchenwald

2010
Contains 2 programs: Buchenwald 1937-1942 and Buchenwald 1942-1945. Every aspect of life within the fences was a torture where mistreatment by the guards was not only encouraged but was compulsory. Herman Pister's installment as commandant in 1942 only intensified the horrors committed there with experimentation on inmates in ways to kill more conveniently. The atrocities were discovered with its liberation by U.S. forces in 1945 and the desire for revenge took over as camp personnel were hunted down and made to publicly stand trial for war crimes.
Where Do You Stand? Stories from an American Mill

2004

Where Do You Stand? Stories from an American Mill

2004
Traces the story of the 25-year struggle of Fieldcrest-Cannon textile workers to form a union in the face of modernization and globalization.
Screenwriters on Screenwriting

2008

Screenwriters on Screenwriting

2008
This documentary premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Explore the challenging world of the screenwriter with renowned industry writers.
A Sizwe Bansi Workshop

1981

A Sizwe Bansi Workshop

1981
The play, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, follows the main character, Sizwe, as he writes to his wife after an unsuccessful search for a new job and better life for his family. This film places the viewer in the discussions between the writers of the play: Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona as they attempt to explain and re-write the play.
Life in Australia: Mount Gambier

1964

Life in Australia: Mount Gambier

1964
Made by the Department of Immigration to entice immigrants from Great Britain, this film shows an idyllic picture of life in the South Australian regional town of Mount Gambier in the mid 1960s.
The Red Button

2011

The Red Button

2011
Tells the dramatic story of Stanislav Petrov, the Russian officer who, in 1983, saved the world from atomic war.