Watch ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy’, a Surrealist Film by Dada filmmaker Hans Richter, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger.
Performance
Performance arts, music, film, drama and literature, creative expressions presented on the world stage seeking earth balance, harmony, dissonance, abstraction and concept.
Nico, Warhol Muse, from the Dark Side of the Street
At one time billed as the Moon Goddess and Andy Warhol It-Girl, singer Nico’s dark, avant-garde music and deep, hypnotic voice were first heard in the Velvet Underground. She continued to work sporadically as a solo artist after leaving the Velvets, though a longtime heroin addiction and methadone dependency sidetracked her career. Check out the documentary on her life, Nico:Icon.
Once a Classical Giant, Then Obscure, Felix Draeseke Rediscovered
Stephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. Felix Draeseke of Germany, once dubbed a “giant” by Franz Liszt, fell into obscurity until only recently.
Epic of Cruelty and Revolution in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’
Battleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent revolutionary propaganda film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers.
The Real Imagination of Artist Francis Bacon
The Irish-British Francis Bacon was both reviled and revered throughout his life for his raw, grotesque and confronting figurative painting. This documentary explores the life of one of modern art’s most intriguing artists.
Art of Collective Madness in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Impressions’
Salvador Dalí and filmmaker José Montes-Baquer, in honor of underappreciated Surrealist Poet Raymond Roussel, shot a fake documentary of an non-expedition to Mongolia in search of gigantic mythic hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Fela Kuti, Revolutionary Insurrectionist, Talismanic Afrobeat Pioneer
Fela Kuti, Nigerian music legend, political insurrectionist and provocateur against the corporate and missionary sell-out of African wisdom and religion, ending up in jail and tortured…and loved by the African people. Here, Jamaican-born, Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett puts us on Fela’s life path, his wild and unstructured Afrobeat sound, the commune, the wives, and the push against the Nigerian military dictatorship.