| August 2008 |
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ZEITGEIST PICKS UP LOUISE BOURGEOIS DOCUMENTARY Back by popular demand at New York’s Film Forum, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine is a film journey inside the life and imagination of an icon of modern art. For six decades, Louise Bourgeois (currently enjoying a full career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum) has been at the forefront of successive new developments in contemporary art, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. And in the decades since, she has created her most powerful and persuasive work. Filmed between 1993 and 2007, this labor of love is an intimate, human engagement with an artist’s world. |
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BILLY THE KID COMING TO DVD Long awaited on DVD since its theatrical release last fall, Jennifer Venditti’s award-winning documentary is a provocative coming-of-age story—an odyssey into the soul of an American teenager. Following 15-year-old Billy as he wanders the quiet streets of small-town Maine, we watch him grapple with isolation and first-time young love as he traverses the frustrating gap between imagination and reality. By turns exhilarating and disturbing, and featuring an electrifying soundtrack by KISS and a host of emerging indie artists, Billy the Kid captures an intimate view of an expressive and seemingly fearless outsider. Our special edition DVD contains an audio commentary with Venditti and Billy fan Ryan Gosling, and an 8-page booklet with an essay by Miranda July. |
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WHAT REMAINS: THE LIFE AND WORK Steven Cantor’s portrait of photographer Sally Mann has been nominated for two News & Documentary Emmy awards for Best Documentary and Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming. A rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist, What Remains—named after Mann’s recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay—contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann’s work. Described by Time magazine as “America’s greatest photographer,” Sally Mann first came to international prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex and enigmatic pictures of her three children. |
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ZEITGEIST DOCUMENTARIES NOW AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE ON iTUNES Imagine you’re on a long plane journey this summer and Bee Movie is the only film playing, wouldn’t you like to be able to watch Into Great Silence on your iPhone or video iPod? Well, now you can! If the contemplative Into Great Silence doesn't seem like the ideal iPod movie, iTunes has also made available for purchase Ballets Russes, Short Cut to Nirvana, The Gleaners and I and Manufactured Landscapes. And other titles will be announced soon. We'd love to hear from you if you end up watching Manufactured Landscapes on a bus journey through China, or Ballets Russes on the Trans-Siberian Express. Drop us a line! |
IF THE OLYMPICS HAS WHET YOUR APPETITE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT CHINA, CHECK OUT THESE DOCUMENTARIES FROM ZEITGEIST If you enjoyed Zhang Yimou’s spectacular staging of the Olympics’ Opening Ceremonies you might like to see his only slightly more modest staging of Puccini’s opera Turandot in Beijing’s Forbidden City documented in Allan Miller’s The Turandot Project. And for a look at another stunning Beijing park full of structures to rival the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, see Jia Zhang-ke’s theme-park melodrama The World. |
Most of the films mentioned in this newsletter are also available for educational/institutional purchase or rental. For educational/institutional orders please email us. |
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