Sexuality
A Girl and Her Room by Rania Matar
Rania Matar has produced an exhibition and a book of unique and subtle power. Focusing on contemporary young women from vastly differing cultures in the United States and Lebanon, her project, A Girl and Her Room, reveals the complex lives of her subjects in the unique setting of the girls’ own rooms.
Body and Spirit: Andres Serrano
From September 27 through October 26, this show will feature a selection of works surveying 25 years of Serrano’s career, including a range of images from the various series that have solidified Serrano’s standing in the contemporary art landscape.
Rebecca Horn: Body Art, Performance & Installations
Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn has been creating an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings and photographs
Catherine Opie’s: High School Football
Catherine Opie’s images of teenage football warriors and their battlefields – finds new life in its first showing in New York.
!Women Art Revolution
Women Art Revolution annotates the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States from the personal perspective of feminist artist and film director Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini
The film is an adaptation of the ancient Arabic anthology The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, better known as The Arabian Nights. It is the last of Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life”, which began with The Decameron and continued with The Canterbury Tales
Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini
In Teorema, the actors don’t act, but simply exist to be photographed. The movie itself is the message, a series of cool, beautiful, often enigmatic scenes that flow one into another with the rhythm of blank verse.
Vivre Sa Vie by Jean-Luc Godard
1962 | French
www.criterion.com
Vivre sa vie, made in 1962, was the fourth of Jean-Luc Godard’s films. His source was a journalistic account of prostitution in France, and in this as in so many matters, he was self-consciously echoing the American directors he admired, such as Samuel Fuller, whose Underworld U.S.A. (1961) was based on a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post. Also like Fuller, he didn’t exactly limit himself to a literal adaptation of his source material.
Jeff Koons: Made in Heaven
In “Made in heaven” Jeff Koons made works depicting his sexual relationship with his wife, the Italian porn-star Ilona Staller, also known as Cicciolina. These provocative works show the naked couple in explicit poses and reference paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet to examine the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons employed Ilona’s regular photographer and backdrops, to create the distinctive aesthetic associated with ‘glamour’ imagery. Blurring the boundaries between fine art and pornography, Koons challenged the conventions of artistic taste, encouraging his audience to make their own decisions about what is acceptable.
Thirst by Park Chan-wook
Original title: Bakjwi | Korea, 2009 | 133 min
www.focusfeatures.com
A priest becomes a vampire…another man’s wife is coveted…a deadly seduction triggers murder. Thirst is the new film from director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). Already a boxoffice smash in Korea, Thirst was honored with the Prix du Jury at the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival.
Continuing his explorations of human existence in extreme circumstances, the director spins a tale that he conceived and then developed over several years with co-screenwriter Chung Seo-kyung.
Sang-hyun is a priest who cherishes life; so much so, that he selflessly volunteers for a secret vaccine development project meant to eradicate a deadly virus. But the virus takes the priest, and a blood transfusion is urgently ordered up for him. The blood he receives is infected, so Sang-hyun lives – but now exists as a vampire. Struggling with his newfound carnal desire for blood, Sang-hyun’s faith is further strained when a childhood friend’s wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), comes to him asking for his help in escaping her life. Sang-hyun soon plunges into a world of sensual pleasures, finding himself on intimate terms with the Seven Deadly Sins.
Antichrist by Lars Von Trier
Denmark, 2009 | 108 minutes | Color, Black and White
www.criterion.com
In this graphic psychodrama, a grief-stricken man and woman retreat to their cabin deep in the woods after the accidental death of their infant son, only to find terror and violence at the hands of nature and, ultimately, each other. But this most confrontational work yet from one of contemporary cinema’s most controversial artists is no mere provocation. It is a visually sublime, emotionally ravaging journey to the darkest corners of the possessed human mind; a disturbing battle of the sexes that pits rational psychology against age-old superstition; and a profoundly effective horror film.
Dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror).
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist Movie Stills