The Diamond King

Dick Perez, official Baseball Hall of Fame artist for over 20 years, painted the game's history and every inductee - a project he continues in his 80s. This childhood immigrant's portraits changed commemoration of America's iconic pastime.

Pop Goes the Easel

Pop Goes the Easel was Ken Russell’s first full-length documentary for the BBC’s arts series Monitor. It focused on 4 British Pop Artists - Peter Blake, Peter Philips, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier.

O Cristo de Vitória da Conquista

Bridget Riley: Painting the Line

With exclusive behind-the-scenes access, seldom-seen footage from the archives and a rare interview with Kirsty Wark, this is the story of a true visionary of British art.

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

The Art of Cornwall

An alternative history of the 20th century avant-garde featuring the dramatic lives and works of eight artists who most made the art colony of St Ives in Cornwall, from Kit Wood and Alfred Wallis to Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.

Le grand roman de l'homme

At what point in our evolution did we start talking? To paint, play music and travel? When did we build our first imaginary worlds? When was the need to believe born? In short, where, when and how did the contours of man's essence take shape? Going back to the origins of language, art and writing, this documentary by Emmanuel Leconte and Franck Guérin traces the fantastic cultural epic of thought. Although animals also dream, today only our species has the power to recount its dreams, transforming them into stories, narratives and destinies... But where does this astonishing human faculty come from?

Citizen Lane

Citizen Lane is an innovative mix of documentary and drama that delivers a vivid and compelling portrait of Hugh Lane, one of the most fascinating and yet enigmatic figures in modern Irish history. A man of multiple contradictions, by turns infuriatingly parsimonious or extraordinarily generous, a professed nationalist and a knight of the realm; a monumental snob and a fearless campaigner for access to the arts.

Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait

Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait explores the recurring themes in Bacon’s work, his influences and his life. The documentary is accompanied by a haunting score specially composed by Edwin Astley for the production.

Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life

Deeply thoughtful and illuminating, DRAWING A LIFE reveals the details of artist Geoff McFetridge’s life and work while delving further into the universal questions of what makes a fulfilling life and how to live with intention in the limited time we all have.

PHOENIX

Daniel Richter on Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde was a Nazi – and so what, asks contemporary German artist Daniel Richter. “It’s a moralistic debate. A debate, that mirrors the moralism and bigottery of a generation that seems to think, that the world is a moral playground.” Emil Nolde’s relationship to the Nazi-regime in the Third Reich has given rise to immense discussions within the last months. For decades the broader public had a picture of Nolde being one of the “entartete” artists as well as being prohibited painting by the Nazi-regime. Though this on the surface is true, it was the result of a great disappointment to Nolde. For years, he had strived to become “the” artist of the Thrid Reich, praising his own art as true, German, anti-French and anti-Jewish. Possible competitors within the German art world like Max Pechstein he actively denounced to the Nazi authorities.

Spiegelbeeld

Tilburg artist Tommy van der Loo searches for the influence of superiority thinking, racism and colour in his life. Van der Loo is an emerging artist and his work has been purchased by Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He also had an exhibition at the Kunsthal. He also made the memorial for the abolition of slavery in Eindhoven. He has had multiple experiences with discrimination and incorporates that into his sculptures. Identity and image formation are important to him: How do you look at others, how do others look at you. The search is the inspiration for his new sculpture.

Aufbruch in die Moderne - die deutsche Künstlergemeinschaft 'Brücke'

This movement marks the beginning of modern art in Germany. It is the German equivalent of French Fauvism, from which it draws its main inspiration, but it carries an Expressionist and social emphasis that is characteristic of Nordic 'angst.' The artists of Die Brucke were restless creatures, over-sensitive, haunted by religious, sexual, political or moral obsessions. Dramatic landscapes and nudes, mystical and visionary compositions, scenes of the countryside, the streets, the circus, the cafe-dansants and the demi-monde were their principal subjects. Their pure colours blaze in acid stridency, encompassed by rough, dry contours which show the influence of African art and primitive woodcuts. The work of the following is shown: Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Muller, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein.

Henry Moore: London 1940-42

A montage, using documentary material filmed during the war, shows the beginnings of an air attack and Londoners entering shelters. From the silent deserted streets, the film moves underground into the world of Henry Moore's shelter drawings. People sit along subway platforms, looking after their children, settling down for the night, sleeping in bunks and on the floor. Above ground London burns. Henry Moore used the eye of a sculptor in portraying the stolidity and enduring patience of a besieged people. This film brings together a unique series of drawings which are some of the most remarkable achievements of an artist during wartime. Eliminating all narration, it explores, on several metaphoric levels, the very nature of human consciousness and creativity.

Kandinsky

The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky claimed, or has been credited with, the 'creation' of abstract art. At the core of this film is a dramatic recreation of Kandinsky's account of returning to his studio one dark evening, and being astonished by an unknown masterpiece of abstract art leaning against the easel - a picture which turned out to be one of his own landscapes fallen on its side. 'Now I knew for certain that the object spoiled my pictures.' While this film's narration does indeed emphasize the notion of an inspired breakthrough to Abstraction, the picture it conveys in more purely filmic ways is a rich and complex one.

Teaches of Peaches

Peaches - artist, feminist, rock star. She has been challenging gender stereotypes for over 20 years and is on par with the icons of the pop and rock world. With exclusive private archive material and current footage of preparations and concerts of her 2022 jubilee tour “20 Years of Teaches of Peaches”, we learn how the Canadian Merrill Nisker became the internationally celebrated musician and electro-clash icon Peaches.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter

Interviews with the junior designers swept into the 24-7 world of "The Eamery" are the heart of this complex picture of a husband-and-wife creative team that define the era of Mid-Century Modernism. Narrated by James Franco, the film draws from a trove of archival material, primarily the stunning films and photographs produced in mind-boggling volume by Charles, Ray, and their staff during the hyper-creative forty years of the Eames Office.

L'Espionne aux tableaux, Rose Valland face au pillage nazi

Paris 1943. Hitler set up the systematic looting of works of art in France. Rose Valland, infiltrated as intendant at the Jeu de Paume museum, which has become the sorting station for works leaving for Germany, will take all the risks to oppose this spoliation enterprise.

The Business of Thought: A Recorded History of Artists Space

An oral history of Artists Space, the legendary New York artists organization. Told through the voices of the artists, critics and curators who formed it, the film is narrated by voiceover culled from 30 hours of archival cassette tape interviews over a 45 year period. Artists such as Laurie Anderson, Mike Kelley, Hito Steyerl and David Wojnarowicz walk us through the decades. A formally-experimental and raucously-told chronology composed of rare archival documentation, The Business of Thought... is a reminder of the radical potential of the arts and the importance of collective, cultural spaces.