The Doldrums

A group of partygoers consider what awaits them after death.

Syndrome K

Syndrome K is the true story about a highly contagious, highly fictitious disease created by three Roman Catholic doctors during the holocaust to hide Jews in a Vatican-affiliated hospital.

Untitled

In this hyper-realistic digitally rendered video, sandwiches are assembled in sequence. Each component, from the first slice of bread to the last, is dropped dramatically from a height, before bouncing and settling into place in slow motion. Mayonnaise, then ham, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and the final slice on top. This perfect yet uncanny choreography reads like an exaggerated, perverse take on ‘food-porn’ obsessed advertising campaigns. These sequences repeat, the sound gradually incorporates saws and machinery, echos from empty environments, pianos breaking, smashes, crashes and mechanical crescendos like jet engines alongside eerie drones, bells, and hard rummaging noises. Another piece of bread lands, some rubber baby dolls fall onto it, some brown slop, a blanket, denim jeans, some businessmen in suits, and more slop. Ketchup, then a union jack, all encased in the final layer of bread that falls to the top of the pile to the sound of a tolling bell. Infinite continuation, loop.

Angel

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.

Conclave ed Elezione di Pio XII

A short documentary covering the conclave and election of Pope Pius XII.

Así Nació el Obelisco

The construction of the Obelisco in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Evian Disesase

For Ed Atkins, Marten’s "Evian Disease" embodies ‘flatness’ in all its weightlessness, emotional deficit and hollowness of representation. The fact that it’s completely unapologetic about it is what makes it a dangerous piece to his mind.

Orchids, or a hemispherical bottom

Orchids,… centers on an animated video in which Marten sets forth a sanitised and alluring world of free-floating and fragmentary objects. Excised from normal context and imbued with an impossible cosmetic sheen, these crystalline forms are conjured in colours that range from the surreally heightened to the deliberately banal. A line of toy-like objects – a train, a giraffe on wheels, a boat – trundles along on an impossibly turquoise plane. Parasitically followed by a swirling black fly, the unfolding narrative is one of production, consumption and saturation. Elsewhere, the naked human backside of the title (cropped and anonymous) is shown with a luridly-glowing orchid tucked between its buttocks. At points, the imagery takes on the semblance of a painting or diagram, both formulaic ‘analogues’ of reality, like the video itself, implying the knotty weight of a Cézanne still life.

Dieter Roth. Solo Scenes. 1997-98

These 131 video monitors stacked in a grid present simultaneous, continuous footage of the German artist during the last year of his life. In this filmed diary-project that Dieter Roth executed while convalescing in Reykjavik and Basel, we see him not only working in his studio but also while he sleeps, bathes, and uses the bathroom. It is nearly impossible to pay attention to only one video without becoming distracted by an unexpected sound or movement coming from one of the many other screens. Each monitor broadcasts a different point in the artist's daily routine, while the gridlike arrangement of monitors reinforces a sense of order and chronology.

The Enclave

Commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, The Enclave is an immersive, six-screen video art installation by Irish contemporary artist Richard Mosse. Partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s modernist literary masterpiece Heart of Darkness, the visceral and moving work was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo using 16mm colour infra-red film, which captures otherwise invisible parts of the spectrum. The resulting imagery in Mosse’s work is hallucinatory and dream-like with the usual greens of jungle and forest replaced by shimmering violet. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects its complexity, using a strategy of beauty and transfixion to combat the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many.

It was in the winter and you were born at the beginning of spring

An ironic and touching moment between a mother and son shot in this short film by Mahdi Baraghithi

Vasco Rossi @Olimpico.07

Appunti su un fatto di cronaca

On the evening of March 11, 1950, Annabella Bracci, a 12-year-old girl, was brutally killed and thrown into a pit on the outskirts of Rome, near the village of Primavalle. A brief and poetic account of the events and their impact on an impoverished community. A handful of wild flowers and a painful catch in the voices.

Projections

The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.

Fellinopolis

Ferruccio Castronuovo was the only authorized eye, between 1976 and 1986, to film the brilliant Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) in his personal and creative intimacy, to capture the gears of his great circus, his fantastic lies and his crazy inventions.

Astérix le Gaulois

In the year 50 BC, Gaul is occupied by the Romans - nearly. But the small village of Asterix and his friends still resists the Roman legions with the aid of their druid's magic potion, which gives superhuman strength. Learning of this potion, a Roman centurion kidnaps the druid to get the secret formula out of him.

Rome, the Eternal City

A Traveltalk style documentary look at Rome.

Astérix et le Coup du menhir

Gaullish custom requires that a would-be chief must challenge and defeat another to become the leader of two tribes. Vitalstatistix is not perturbed because of Getafix's magic potion. Getafix, however has an accident and forgets how to make it. Then Vitalstatistix is suddenly challenged.

Appunti romani

A documentary on Rome from the late 19th century to the early third millennium (made almost entirely from archival and found footage)

Les antiquités de Rome

Rousseau's first full-length feature, and one of the best documentaries/experimental films of the past few decades, sprung equally from Robert Bresson, Michael Snow, and Jean-Marie Straub (who has called Rousseau one of the three best working artists in modern Europe). Again hard places played against drifting sounds from unseen sites beyond the image; the images and sounds, repeated, become inflections of each other. But this time there are historical inflections; Rousseau's film, like Straub's, takes place in a sort of meta-history as characters and ancient sites each become products of outside light and shadow.