Performance Pieces (1990)

How to Steal a Million

A woman must steal a statue from a Paris museum to help conceal her father's art forgeries.

Blue Man Group: The Complex Rock Tour Live

Offbeat performance artists The Blue Man Group have finally been captured live on this disc that features concert footage, three full-length music videos and three songs from Blue Man Group's album, "The Complex." The live footage was filmed during Blue Man Group's successful and widely acclaimed August 2003 rock tour, where they wowed 9,000 fans in two sold-out concerts.

She's All That

High school hotshot Zach Siler is the envy of his peers. But his popularity declines sharply when his cheerleader girlfriend, Taylor, leaves him for sleazy reality-television star Brock Hudson. Desperate to revive his fading reputation, Siler agrees to a seemingly impossible challenge. He has six weeks to gain the trust of nerdy outcast Laney Boggs -- and help her to become the school's next prom queen.

Whatever Happened to Gelitin

Art dealer Salvatore Viviano and director Angela Christlieb embark on a search for the lost artist collective Gelitin, which since the 1990s has shattered the borders of "good taste" again and again with extravagant actions and installations. Interviews with old companions and artist friends in the U.S., Europe, and Asia are linked with anarchically montaged Gelitin archive material: intense, transgressive, experimental, gaudily colorful, funny, and virulent.

White Rabbit

A dramatic comedy following a Korean American performance artist who struggles to be authentically heard and seen through her multiple identities in modern Los Angeles.

Mironins

Every night, when the museum closes its doors, the mironins, Blu, Low and Ro, three little drops of paint that live in the paintings created by the Spanish painter Joan Miró (1893-1983), come to life and immerse themselves in an inexhaustible universe where art and imagination reign.

Fear, Anxiety and Depression

An unsuccessful playwright faces trials and tribulations as he seeks to find himself in New York City.

Fifis the Unbeatable

A tough sailor, Fotis, returns to Greece to marry his beloved and to settle certain inheritance issues with his twin brother Fifis, who is an effeminate artist. Their striking resemblance will upset the lives of both of them equally.

Help Me I'm Dying

Filmed live at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, the self-proclaimed sweatiest woman in show business brings you her first ever standup special. Told in three acts and influenced heavily by her loves of surrealism and Russia, with multiple scripted sketches and filmed segments, her unique brand of humor will have you laughing while wondering, “is she ok?”.

Apple Pie

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

Louvre Come Back to Me!

Pepe Le Pew, the eternally amorous skunk, is in Paris, where his stench sends a female cat upward to hit a freshly painted flagpole, which puts a white stripe on her back and causes Pepe to think she also is a skunk. He lustfully pursues her into the Louvre art gallery.

Eggshells

Created in response to a traumatic hate crime, artist, Venus Patel, explores her emotional journey through several archetypes, each of whom perform with an egg. Using the weapon of the assailant, the egg itself becomes a tool with many psychological and symbolic meanings within it. The power of reincarnation, birth, nature, hope while also pointing to the power it has to utterly humiliate and embarrass if used in a certain way. There is an embrace of the absurdity of these performances while still speaking to the deeper subject matter. By placing the outlandish characters into public spaces, they confront a preconceived notion of pushing true queer expression into only hidden spaces or only at night, into the daylight and into the normal everyday experience.

Blind Country

This collaborative video project is based on a short story by H.G. Wells called "The Country of the Blind"—about a man who travels to a country of blind people and attempts to dominate their sensual, feminine culture with his male, sight-derived power. Following this theme, "Blind Country" begins with animated fruit dancing over Mike Kelley's body and the admonition of "Northerners" to "refill the quickly emptying sack." In the male-dominated land of the North, candy-spurting pinatas stand as phallic symbols. Presumably castrated, and stripped of his authority, Kelley acts the buffoon as he is led through the murky land of the South, a "female," earthy, "realm of the senses" opposing the phallocentric world of the North.

Balkan Erotic Epic - Single Channel Version

The film explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.

Leninland

At the peak of Perestroika, in 1987, in the village of Gorki, where Lenin spent his last years, after a long construction, the last and most grandiose museum of the Leader was opened. Soon after the opening, the ideology changed, and the flow of pilgrims gradually dried up. Despite this, the museum still works and the management is looking for ways to attract visitors. Faithful to the Lenin keepers of the museum as they can resist the onset of commercialization. The film tells about the modern life of this amazing museum-reserve and its employees.

Dressed to Kill

After witnessing a mysterious woman brutally slay a homemaker, prostitute Liz Blake finds herself trapped in a dangerous situation. While the police thinks she is the murderer, the real killer is intent on silencing her only witness.

Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net

As Cirque du Soleil reboots its flagship production, O, more than a year after an abrupt shutdown, performers and crew members face uncertainty as they work to return to their world-class standards in time for the (re)opening night in Las Vegas. With unfettered access, filmmaker Dawn Porter captures the dramatic journey of the world's most famous circus act on its way back from the brink.

Search for the Jewel of Polaris: Mysterious Museum

While visiting a museum, two siblings Ben and Kim a fierce electrical storm creates a passage between the real world and worlds within the paintings. They are magically whisked through time to the 1600's and find they must square off against a wicked magician and also locate a valuable jewel in order to return to the present day.

O Artista e a Força do Pensamento

THE ARTIST AND THE FORCE OF THOUGHT, reflects the relationship between balance and imbalance within the partiality of movement of the dancer Marcos Abranches. It oscillates the body to wake up from the emptiness and isolation caused by the imbalance. The movement's lack of aesthetics is felt by abandonment and rejection, understanding that relief is in the support of love. Investigating body movement in a world without anguish, without pain, without despair. Search for life. Find in dance the balance of the body and the beauty of the soul.

Live!

A mockumentary following an ambitious TV network executive trying to produce a controversial reality show where contestants play Russian Roulette.

House of Flesh Mannequins

A loner artist with a history of abuse meets a beautiful woman who takes an interest in his life and work; leading to a chilling path of tragedy.

El Cuerpo del Escándalo - Un film acerca de Natacha Voliakovsky

Plot unavailable

Francofonia

Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

The Underdog Knight

Lao San is a young veteran high in Kungfu power but low in intelligence. After landing on a job as a body guard for a wealthy antique collector, Lao San finds out his boss's plot to rob the National Art Museum.

Looking for Richard

Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."

The Quiet Silence

Bustoni, a performing arts worker who lives with his mother who are dying, has a question that distract his life. What will happen to a woman after death?

Mondo New York

A young woman wanders around New York City and stumbles across a number of strange characters and settings that represent the "underground" areas of the city. She sees stand up comedy in Central Park, a prostitution auction, a voodoo ceremony, an S&M club, and a number of very interesting performance artists. These are just a few of the sights and sounds of New York that she encounters.

Love in Times of whatever the present is called

In a museum where the paintings come to life inside their frames, a cleaning lady must decide whether to intervene when a new acquisition portrays the rape of a slave.

Halsey: If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power - Global Performance Experience

A one night only global performance experience, presented by Moment House, where Halsey performs tracks live for the first time from her new album, "If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power".

Hanging from a Dream

The history of how the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art of Cuenca was created. In the mid-1950s, the Spanish collector and painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala (1924-84) becomes fascinated by the young generation of Spanish abstract artists, so he begins to collect their works to show them to the public in Toledo. Until Gustavo Torner, a young forest engineer interested in art, proposes him to visit his city, Cuenca.

Psychic TV: First Transmission

For over 30 years, the so-called First Transmission video from Psychic TV, has been the stuff of, well, “snuff film” legend. First advertised in the back pages of Thee Grey Book , The First Transmission was an ultra weird touchstone of the underground VHS tape trading scene of the 1980s.

Looking for Modern Art: Rethinking Art History

Many twentieth century European artists, such as Paul Gauguin or Pablo Picasso, were influenced by art brought to Europe from African and Asian colonies. How to frame these Modernist works today when the idea of the primitive in art is problematic?

Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait

A sincere portrait, and in first person, of the multifaceted Andalusian artist José Pérez Ocaña.

Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm

"What we were trying to do was the ultimate form of architecture, which was predicting how society would use space, land and time." Curtis Schreier, ANT FARM Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm is the first film to consider the work of the renegade 1970s art/architecture collective Ant Farm, best known for its iconic land-art piece Cadillac Ranch. Radical architects, video pioneers, and mordantly funny cultural commentators, the Ant Farmers created a body of deeply subversive multidisciplinary work that questioned the boundaries of architecture and everything else in the process. Incorporating breathtaking archival video, new footage shot over ten years and animation based on zany period sketches, this film is about the joy of creation in a time when there were no limits. —Beth Federici