Frank Zappa: Music In Review

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

A vacuum repairman moonlights as a street musician and hopes for his big break. One day a Czech immigrant, who earns a living selling flowers, approaches him with the news that she is also an aspiring singer-songwriter. The pair decide to collaborate, and the songs that they compose reflect the story of their blossoming love.

Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news and entertainment altered all preceding media of news and entertainment

A short, silent, experimental film created by avant-garde created by Ukranian-born artist, Anna Malina.

"In continuo" uses slaughterhouse imagery to present the warlike nature of man, first depicting the cleaning and mechanical preparations for the slaughterhouse and then the killing, however, the animal slaughter itself isn’t shown.

An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.

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Hauntology of the Retrodromomania is an essayistic motion picture, a locomotory legwork, a deambulatory non-rural land survey, a casual journeying in a punctual dissertation around the phenomenon of the nostalgic feeling, discoursing on a late capitalistic landscape of social emotions, which are of yore, yet coloured of the postmodern tint of pixelated neo-noir, a socio-philosophical flâneur’s trip in critical theory escorted by the spirits of French post-structuralists. For a Sociology of Nostalgia revisited.

For a band with high standards, a perfect show is impossible, and an excellent show is rare. You hope that the norm is "good". To deliver a really exceptional, comfortable performance before a recording truck or film crew has been our unfulfilled dream of many years. Always it seemed that as soon as the machines started rolling, we forgot how to play and our equipment forgot how to work. But for these two nights, the gods smile. And the film becomes not just a concert, but a symbol - for the band a scrapbook, an autobiography, an era frozen in glacial clarity. For the audience, it can be an enduring souvenir, and if it can't quite capture what it was like to be there, it is a way of seeing through many pairs of eyes, of shifting one's vantage-point around and above the players in a way no mortal could. Hands perform, and hands respond. Hands gesture, and hands respond. A show of ears and eyes, a show of hearts and minds. A Show of Hands. - Neil Peart

Hosted by Bette Midler, enjoy a musical tribute to the man who wrote some of the most enduring songs in American popular music. Lyricist Hal David and composer Burt Bacharach dominated the pop-music charts in the 1960s and early ’70s, crafting dozens of timeless Top 40 hits.

Video essay ‘Rock and Cliff' investigates the creation of Horn Town, a new model village and centre of large scale tourist development, and the experiences of rural residents moved there through government-led displacement. Horn Town is located in Wulong, a rural district near the Three Gorges Dam administered by the Chongqing municipality (a city of 30 million people). Narrated in the style of a science documentary but using local Chongqing dialect, the video brings a geological and topographical perspective to types of 'rocks' found in the area,from mythological stones from a mountain cliff, to ruins of the original settlement, to a stone sculpture from a dubious 'Land Art Biennial', in order to address issues of land acquisition, top-down development and spatial politic.

A short documentary on Jerome Kern and the making of Till the Clouds Roll By.

"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.

Life in Notting Hill Gate, concentrating on key problems like housing, welfare and drugs, and featuring interviews with local personalities.

Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.

As a major storm strikes Texas in 1900, a mysterious televisual device is built and tested. Blake Williams’ experimental 3D sci-fi film immerses us in the aftermath of the Galveston disaster to fashion a haunting treatise on technology, cinema, and the medium’s future.

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Captured in High-Definition and Mixed in 5.1 Surround Sound. Join Sheryl Crow as she leads her longtime band through some of her biggest hits in this one-night-only Soundstage performance, which also includes a rare cover of the Nick Lowe classic "(What's So Funny `Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding." Features: My Favorite Mistake, You're An Original, The First Cut Is The Deepest, Leaving Las Vegas, Strong Enough, Redemption Day, Sweet Rosalyn, If It Makes You Happy, Home, All I Wanna Do, Soak Up The Sun, Everyday Is A Winding Road, (What's So Funny `Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, Let's Get Free, Safe and Sound, I Shall Believe, Steve McQueen.

Young Stanzi who is visiting Vienna helps a young corporal and musician to become famous for his marching song "Die Deutschmeister".

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