Marcel Duchamp

A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.

No synopsis available yet.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

A storm of Modernism swept through the art worlds of the West in the early decades of the twentieth century, uprooting centuries of tradition. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France. For an incandescent moment from 1905 to 1930, Paris was the magnetic center for radical innovation and experiment, and the Mecca for creative talents who would change the course of art throughout the Western world.

Three-part, three-hour documentary with interviews about Marcel Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp kept a secret for over 20 years: while the art world had wrongly assumed that one of the 20th century’s most important artists had given up creating art, Duchamp was building his final masterpiece, Etant Donnes (“given”). Duchamp didn’t allow the piece to be viewed by the public until after his death in 1968. This left him shielded from the questions that developed after the piece debuted. Simply described, it is a peepshow. Through an old wooden façade, one looks through to see a sculpted open-legged nude lying in a field. The critics were stumped. What did Duchamp leave us with? This BBC documentary from 1997 dissects and examines the pieces of this assemblage.

A deep dive into the history of São Paulo's avant-garde poetry movement, starting from fragments of the works of poet Augusto de Campos. A collage of rare scenes shows a long trail of comradery between avant-garde poetry and experimental cinema.

Dada came out of the madness of World War One. "The birth of Dada was not the beginning of art but of disgust." Surrealism tried to systematize Dada's anarchy into an artistic blend of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist provocation. In the interests of conquering the irrational, Salvador Dali opened exhibitions dressed in a diving suit, Marcel Duchamp turned himself into woman, Benjamin Peret assaulted priests, and Yves Tanguy ate spiders. Andre Breton, nicknamed "the Pope of Surrealism", led an inspired gang of artists, lunatics and writers. By the 1950s they were denouncing each other for betraying the movement, but their ideas had infected every art form.

Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments”, is a work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. The second part, produced by Paik and Shigeko Kubota, further queries the relationship between everyday gestures and formal notions of dance.

Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.

Edgard Varèse died on 6 November 1965, a few days before the filming of the rehearsal of his work "Déserts" which he had to attend.

1967 film directed by Greta Deseson about the Dada art movement. Featuring Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Hans Richter and Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia

Free-associative images are juxtaposed with disorienting poetry in Richter's late work. The film is visual dynamite: Upside-down and reversed footage, play with shadows and light, billiards and dice and balloons-- suggestive and surreal images. Tenets of Dada writing, such as games of chance, punnery, wordplay and loud nonsense noise are foist upon the viewer as Dada poems are read / performed by their orignal authors.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

Marcel Duchamp alternates between scrutinizing the camera, and smiling and nodding in response to what seems to be a large crowd of off-screen admirers trying to get his attention. Occasionally he puts his fingers to his lips, indicating that he is not supposed to talk.

A short film containing a collection of clips from various Hollywood movies.

Marcel Duchamp and French director Jean-Marie Drot discuss life, art, and chess.

8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.

Hans Richter's documentary on the game of chess. Narrated by Vincent Price. Outlines the history of chess from ancient times to the present and traces its origins in India, China, and Persia. Prints, painting, illuminated manuscripts, live photography and rare chess pieces are shown as well as chess figures designed after Picasso and Braque.

Filmed amidst the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where 35 works by Marcel Duchamp are gathered, this 1956 NBC interview features the artist talking with James Johnson Sweeney, former director of the Guggenheim Museum. Duchamp describes his transition away from Impressionism toward a Cubist, and then post-Cubist, approach, providing commentary while standing before Nude Descending a Staircase (“I was not aware of Italian Futurism when I painted it”) and The Large Glass (“The two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is… almost an intention there… a ready-made intention, in other words, that I respect and love.”). These concepts are paradoxically, although quite logically, articulated alongside his desire for “dryness” and mechanical precision. Viewers also gain insight into Duchamp’s thoughts on painting for an “ideal” public—a notion he clearly distinguishes from ivory-tower elitism.

The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman and an elderly gentleman. The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura. Considered an unfinished film.

Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most dada film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agreements.

Leroy Trenchard loves Therese Verneuil, and when Leroy enters the army goes to France to fight, Therese follows as a Red Cross nurse. But suspicion arises that Therese is actually Princess Sonia, a German spy.

No synopsis available yet.