A portrait of people who live on the margins of life and exist outside normal society.

Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song. A story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.

An epic documentary in two parts about life in the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna.

A sequence of shots of rural landscapes accompanied by readings of texts about the struggles of poor farmers.

Ruiz on the film: "Les Divisions is a documentary about the Château de Chambord and the title comes from the Divisione of Johannes Scotus (Erigena), the ninth century Irish philosopher (who was a 'realist', although the film is more 'nominalist' in characterization of the castle which presents itself as a representation). I say that it is a representation, since it is neither practical for military purposes (too many doors), nor to live in (too many draughts), but only as pure representation. So for the commentary, I tried to imagine how a Renaissance philosopher would view it in a pastiche of a scholastic or gothic text, then a pastiche of Fichte's Vocation of Man and finally a pastiche of Baudrillard."

From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument about Czechoslovak democracy in the period of its rebirth, all administered with the director’s ini­mitable point of view.

Egon Bondy prophesies the hell of global capitalism, Jim Cert admits to cooperating with the StB, Jaroslav Foglar cannot find a beer opener, while Ivan Diviscomments on his own funeral.

After 30 years of chain smoking, Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti sets out on a journey - three times! - to wean himself off cigarettes. He departs from Zürich and walks to St. Gallen, the place were he grew up und also the place where he started smoking. On his pilgrimage through Switzerland he hopes to find the root of his addiction and waits for a final catharsis to release him. Time and time again though, his sympathy for other smokers and disdain for goody-goody non-smokers gets in the way. And time after time his nicotine addiction gets the best of him. His three attempts to quit by walking it off, turn into an expedition of Liechtis home country. He gives a declaration of independence but also a confession of love to Switzerland.

Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwles' meditation on dream, travel and film.

Zdenek Pešánek created the first public kinetic sculpture, for the power station in Prague. This short experimental film focuses on a kinetic sculpture by Zdenek Pešánek. For a period of eight years it issued beams of light from the outside wall of a transformer station at Prague’s power utility before its destruction in 1939. Though genuine, these shots seem abstract to us. They are a rhythmically assembled ode to the light-creating devices and phenomena of electricity. Light arcs, coils, bulbs and various luminous elements support the alternation of positive and negative film images, creating an impressive universe of light and shade. In the 1920s, Pešánek had obtained financial support for his work with electric kinetic light art. In the 1930s, he was the first sculptor to use neon lights. He built several kinetic light pianos, and published a book titled “Kinetismus” in 1941. —http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org

The perfect body as an object of cult worship. Based on the mass sports and body worship movement of the 1920s, the film propagates physical training and shows in stylized documentary scenes aspects of physical hygiene, gymnastics, sports and dancing as well as scenes in which supposed sportsmen of antiquity pose naked.

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

A documentary about hospital patients, staff, and doctors.

“Why does cinema need death, when it can’t show it?” The filmmaker’s monologue and the discourse of images meet

Die UFA, a film essay about the eponymous German studio.

Portrait of a young gay drug addict living in Rome.

A child facing the world, its luck, its cinema, its music, shot in seven days in Rome, Fiumicino, Ciampino and Cinecittà.

Based on an English academic’s memoir on stalking and being stalked, a digital film essay on cinema and absence, on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities. It is a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, and of modern technologies which define the urban stalker as they do the new terrorist.

A short film which focuses on the increasing automation of once human tasks.

Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.

A broken marriage, artists' housing in New York, and Central American politics, director Yvonne Rainer meanders through a lot of philosophical and rhetorical territory.

The voice coming from a recording of Paris 8 Vincennes university lecture long time ago belongs to Gilles Deleuze and reminds us of the intellectual adventure of the 70s whose political and aesthetical echo resonates in the intermittent, non-mandatory structure in the purely cinematographic field.

This is a film both about the spectacle and the space, about how the spectacle has caused the mutation of the (physical and phycological) space in which we reside. This film is determined to be the ‘film on space’ of our times, an epic theater, the general observation of the geological structure of this time. I therefore invent or re-invent some terms for my purpose: Archae(now)logy; Ruinology; space bankruptcy; theater of life -- theater of cruelty -- theater of spectacle; the body-film; the New Berlin Wall - Iron Curtain; and “refugees without camps”, ‘the plants”, “the ghosts,” the asthenosphere, dark energy... I have stolen a great amount of found footages/ready materials or already existed films. This “stealing” is exactly the way to get connected with history and the history of film, to construct an “echo film”.

Poetic film illustrating man’s discovery of the world and his conception of his own place in it by means of the primitive art of India, America, Africa, and Oceania.

Debord’s eighteen-minute Critique of Separation directs its experimental attentions to “the documentary.” Debord draws from a catalogue of newsreel footage and book covers, rephotographed photographs, views of Paris and its neighborhoods, and a catalogue of disabused, seemingly offhand footage of him and his friends in the porous zone comprising the cafe and the street.

Filmed in 1969, but unreleased for 40 years, a film about a Tunisian who travels to France to see his brother, who has been imprisoned.

Rainer's landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliche and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.

An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.

Documenting the tumultuous production of Werner Herzog's film Cobra Verde in Africa, the last of his five collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski.

Privilege is an intelligently conceived, boldly anarchic, and wickedly insightful exposition on the culturally ingrained and socially divisive malaise of isms that artificially define and characterize empowerment in contemporary society: ageism, sexism, economic elitism, and racism. Yvonne Rainer conveys texture through the intercutting of archival footage, video, and film - as well as compositional layering through the film-within-a-film structure, elliptical (and self-referential) fusion of past and present, and the filmmaker's idiosyncratic penchant for superimposed typed text.

How should one define the relationship of documentary film to reality? Does it aim at authenticity or is it rather an “exile of reality”, a “foreign homeland of reality”, where the pre-filmic, stripped of its immediacy, comes to its own right in the first place? Where in its mis-en-scène would be the line drawn to a fictional film, if drawing a line would succeed at all? These are the kind of questions this film essay on the history and aesthetics of documentary film deals with in its seven chapters.

Inspired by a trip to Monument Valley and the Navajo Nation while en route to the Telluride Film Festival, Tahimik and his eldest son Kidlat Gottlieb Kalayaan use the "spaghetti machine" (Tahimik's nickname for his Bolex camera) to make their own "spaghetti western." The decade-long path of the film encompasses the assassination of Bagnino Aquino and the subsequent Yellow Revolution that brought Corazon Aquino to power, the decommissioning of the US air base Camp John Hay, and the younger Kidlat's trajectory through school, all shown through a Third World Projector salvaged from a junk pile on Navajo land.

The story of National Class, real space in real time. Narodni trida, the persistent presence of the street, which, however, is not present - its essential film presence is then a negation of presence, it is a missing presence.

A look at production and destruction and the relation between them.

A dog's funeral becomes part of a chain of absurd events including tomato ketchup battle, a reconstruction of the battle of Austerlitz and motorbike show.

Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity begins with Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Karl Marx’s Capital and James Joyce’s Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein’s notes.

Documentary on the life and work of legendary director Bernardo Bertolucci, using filmed interviews he has given over the last 50 years.

Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.

A meditation or film-essay on metaphysics, perception, and the purpose and progress of mankind.

The second installment of Anton Vidokle’s trilogy on Russian cosmism, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, looks at the poetic dimension of the solar cosmology of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky. Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was imprisoned and later exiled, the film introduces Сhizhevsky’s research into the impact of solar emissions on human sociology, psychology, politics, and economics in the form of wars, revolutions, epidemics, and other upheavals. It aligns the life of post-Soviet rural residents and the futurological projects of Russian cosmism to emphasize that the goal of the early Soviet breakthroughs aimed at the conquest of outer space was not so much technical acceleration, but the common cause of humankind in their struggle against the limitations of earthly life.

Writer James Baldwin tells the story of race in modern America with his unfinished novel, Remember This House.

The most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint.

This film shows the way in which a Costa Rican woman has organized herself to survive, both in rural areas and in urban centers. It denounces the marginality suffered by these workers and urges them to know and fight for their rights. All this within a great diversity of places, environments and activities that show a global panorama of the difficult condition in which the poor woman of Costa Rica lives.

John Berger presents his insights on how people see. Through examples of Art History Berger shows how our very sense of sight has been transformed. By discovering why this is so, according to Berger, "we shall discover something about ourselves."

The film begins with images of a protest in a street. These are immediately followed by shots of a motorway, filmed from above. The accompanying text is revealing: "Of the street not much is left but a traffic road - a movement machine, as Le Corbusier described it[...] The habitable space of the city, the street, has degenerated into a pure locus for traffic." The car has destroyed the street and community life, and the images reinforce this story of loss. Shots of Belgian cities, overrun by cars and trucks, alternate with idyllic sequences of places in Italy where children spend entire days on the street. In short, the film is a vivid case against motorized traffic in our cities.

A translation to film of Raymond Williams’ 1973 book of the same title which traces images of ‘nature’ and ‘town’ through 200 years of English literature.

Pablo Martín Weber’s video essay forges a link between the creative abundance of computer imaging and artificial intelligence and the speculative cosmologies of Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century naturalist and advocate for science. Just as Gosse became obsessed with reconciling the geological record with the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation, Weber attempts to understand the digital image’s new world of infinitely malleable data.

Elie Wiesel, a survivor from Sighet, a town from which a thousand Jews were deported to the ovens of Auschwitz, returns, unknown and unseen, a silent witness to the town where he was born and grew up.

Wim Wenders's atmospheric testimony about the problems he encountered while working on Hammett (1982) with Francis Ford Coppola, and the differences between the film-making process in Europe and the States.

One of the most caustic and personal essay films ever made, Werner Schroeter's account of the 1983 Manila Film Festival, presided over by Imelda Marcos, chronicles the legacy of American and Spanish imperialism as it presents a "kaleidoscope of a ravaged country."

A Vietnamese documentary on human suffering and the meaning of kindness.

Barrage and Bunker is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space are the basis of every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky's Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three "researchers" (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills and screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night's work.

Historically, the cinema close-up was initially employed to convey emotions through facial expressions. But soon filmmakers also began focusing their attention on hands. Using film extracts, Farocki explores this visual language, its symbolism, Freudian slips, automatisms and its music. Often, hands betray an emotion which the face tries to dissimulate. They can also function as a conduit (exchanging money) or witness to a form of competence (work).

This highly personal film essay demonstrates that Chinese cinema has dealt with questions of gender and sexuality more frankly and provocatively than any other national cinema. Yang ± Yin examines male bonding and phallic imagery in the swordplay and kung fu movies of the '60s and '70s; homosexuality; same-sex bonding and physical intimacy; the continuing emphasis on women's grievances in melodramas; and the phenomenon of Yam Kim-Fai, a Hong Kong actress who spent her life portraying men on and off the screen.

The collective life of the generation born as Jurij Gagarin became the first man in space. Vitaly Mansky has woven together a fictional biography – taken from over 5.000 hours of film material, and 20.000 still pictures made for home use. A moving document of the fictional, but nonetheless true life of the generation who grew up in this time of huge change and upheaval.

Bilja was seriously wounded in the 1992 shelling of Sarajevo. A French photographer took pictures of her while she lay bleeding and desperately begging for help; pictures of Bilja's wounds made him famous. Zbanic searches for Bilja and reconstructs the moment when news became more important than her life.

Vipin Vijay's Palace of the Winds is a poetic essay about that "Holy Little Box," the radio, conceived of as a ghostly transmitter of Indian cultural artifacts. Crossing histories, regions, and ages, the radio, in Vijay's view, has "the power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber." Like an errant transmission, this keenly configured work criss-crosses stories like a flick of the dial: here a female singer prevented from singing live at the station, there a lonely housewife who alleviates her husband's absence with the sound of AM; a DJ calling out, a child prodigy from the forties who impersonated the female voice. "Radio here is a liberal instrument, it might be your extended organ, it can move with you, it is transparent as a dream, an oral dream."

Inspired by Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia, this journey to Moldova is narrated through ten letters that reflect on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the contradictory nature of the current power of the communist party, and the uneasy proximity between post-colonialism and nationalism.

Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."

In the century when we invented aviation, when we invented cinema, in an age when we can move more and see more than any other point in history why have we become so watchful and so performative? I Am A Spy is a film that observes this watchfulness.

A self-portrait documentary of Dusan Makavejev who travels to former Yugoslavia, and charts the changes of the society which parallels to his own life.

This film essay about mushrooms and their connections to other living things tries to use the structure of mushrooms to explain nature, science, and civilization, all the while searching for various analogies, such as the similarities between mycorrhiza and other structures.

Lowlands explores the fragility of domestic and creative life in time of war. Its focus is Catharina Bolnes, wife and widow of 17th century painter, Johannes Vermeer of Delft. The film explores her struggle to ensure the family’s survival during the France-Netherlands War (1672-1675), and the bankruptcy she declares after Vermeer’s death leaves her with no income and ten minor children. The film is built from varied sources including paintings of Catharina by Vermeer; etchings depicting Louis XIV’s policy of rape warfare; reenactments of legal depositions by the Vermeer family about domestic violence, forged paintings and bankruptcy; archival b/w films taken in Delft during WWII; contemporary color footage tracking the movements of Louis XIV’s army near Delft in 1672; a deposition by a perpetrator of rape warfare at the Criminal Tribunal in the Hague in 1996….

In Saint-Louis Cathedral, at La Rochelle, in a chapel filled with merchant marine ex-votos, one can contemplate a painting that witnesses the tragedy of The Saphir in 1741.

H*ART ON dives off the deep end of modern art. A film about the yearning to create, to mould everyday emotions into a meaningful life and, most of all, to live beyond one's death. A struggle that gets to the existential core of each of us. How do you find meaning in everyday fear, love, sex and loneliness?

On a talkshow, actor and German TV ikon Joachim Fuchsberger recalls how the games for his show "Nur nicht nervös werden" (Don't Get Nervous), first broadcast on West German TV in 1960, were developed along the lines of American psychiatry. Asked "So how many crazy people watched you?", he responded: "A whole crazy, psychologically disturbed nation". Why were the Germans or to be more precise, the West Germans, a psychologically disturbed nation at that time? This is a film about cheerful and serious games, therapies for re-education and self-imposed re-education, as well as the history of the idea of permanent revolution. Those appearing include directors and producers of gameshows, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and the diversely paranoid.

This short piece for the television station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) is highly relevant to Farocki's later work. Zwei Wege is a cheeky description of a picture; Farocki shows us an image, a religious allegory showing the 'right' and the 'wrong' path for a Christian. The one path leads to heaven, the other to hell. Farocki uses the camera in effect to dissect the picture; he shows close-ups of the paintings various motifs, which he underscores with rhymes. This method of breaking down an image with the camera reminds us of similar sequences in his essay films, namely Wie man sieht and Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges.