Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art

Frenzy is the last film from Hitchcock and at the same time the first film that brought his emigration to the USA back to Great Britain.

When Mario, a bad boy, is released from prison, he plans to live honestly with his wife Geneviève. But the latter has not waited for him and Mario, out of spite, accepts to work as a tout for Mr. Charlie, the boss of a white slave trade gang. His first assignment consists in seducing Michèle, a Montmartre nightclub singer and hostess, into signi...

Spoof of the casual sexual adventures of a one-time child actor in Hollywood. It also involves a bratty on-again, off-again lesbian character.

A harsh but deeply sympathetic sociological essay film about gay life in Berlin in a time of secrecy and oppression, with no diegetic sound and constant narration, following Daniel's unsatisfying immersion into gay society.

A film about the naturalness of sexuality. Its four sequences feature heterosexual and homosexual lovemaking, dogs copulating, and naked childen at play.

Mona is engaged but wants to remain untouched until she is married.

Linda's frustration with her inability to achieve orgasm causes a friend to recommend that she see a sex therapist about her problem. During the exam the therapist discovers that Linda's clitoris is located in her throat and recommends deep throating as a treatment to her ailment. Linda then goes on to experiment with this new technique as she s...

A film about woman's onanistic fantasies.

M is German director Fritz Lang’s masterpiece that illustrates the portrait of a child murderer that has caused an entire city to begin rioting. The film is based on actual events.

A decadent London aristocrat hires a man-servant to attend to his needs. However, the balance of power starts to shift...

This loosely plotted coming-of-age tale follows the life of 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier as he stumbles his way over the burgeoning swell of adolescence in 1950s France. After having his first sexual experience with a prostitute and dodging the lips of a priest, Chevalier contracts a case of scarlet fever. When the fever leaves him with a heart...

An attack on a piece of reactionary German legislation discriminating against young film directors. The film features a head-on, close-up shot of a penis ‘mouthing’ the parliamentary defense of the law by its author. A landmark in political pamphleteering, the film was selected for the 1968 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival by a commi...

Interview with Jason Holliday aka Aaron Payne. House-boy, would-be cabaret performer, and self-proclaimed hustler giving one man's gin-soaked, pill-popped view of what it was like to be black and gay in 1960s United States. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Milestone Films in 2013.

The Austrian avant-gardist Otto Muehl may well be the most scandalous filmmaker to ever work in cinema, and Sodoma stands as his most famous work. This creation takes the experiments a bit further down the road.

Another try by the Viennese actionists around Otto Mühl, trying to shock the middle-class bourgeoisie with all sorts of explicit sexual and excretory processes.

A subversive and experimental film from Otmar Bauer and Günter Brus.

The bad conscience of the German displayed in the ultimate sexual fantasy, combining brutality of the Nazi SS with the defenseless attractiveness of the victimized Jewess already tattooed with the symbol no German can exorcise.

The movements, routines and gestures that compose an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary housewife, recorded in the minutest every more oppressive details, become a sort of catalyst by the unique and simple means of having the woman played by a man with long hair and a slightly androgynous look.

A man penetrates by night in a nurse dormitory planning to kill them all. While he accomplishes to his self imposed task thoughts and obsessions come to his mind revealing his love deficits...

The movie follows Joe, a heroin addict, throughout his quest to score more drugs. The episodic plot occurs over a single day and centers on Joe's problematic relationship with his on-off, sexually frustrated girlfriend. During the course of the day, Joe overdoses in front of an upper-class couple, attempts to fool Welfare into approving his meth...

"Why Do They Do It ?" preached that it was decent to be a sexual creature. A panel discussion in the Student Association as a kind of frame, you watch various so-called live shows and you met actors like Effie Schou, Søren Strømberg, Dale Robinson and Keld Rex Holm. A lot of attention was given to Bodil Joensen, a very pet-friendly young lady, w...

George Stoney investigates the living conditions, both good and bad, in the rural, segregated South.

Report on fetal development, from sperm to the newborn, based on Lennart Nilsson's photo suite.

Kirsa Nicholina records the birth of a child at home by the Lamaze method. The father assists in the birth, while a physician guides him. At the moment of birth, the mother reaches down and grasps the hand of the emerging child and guides it out of her body and into her arms.

An intimate study of the life of a domestic cat, taking place over a period of months as she gives birth to a litter of kittens and cares for them as they grow.

Filmed in the Hortobágy region of the Great Hungarian Plain, Hoellering presents three generations of herdsmen and an arresting depiction of societal progress.

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With t...

Gimme Shelter is a film about the Rolling Stones live tour in 1969 and focusing on one concert that got out of hand. This documentary shows parts of the concerts, the violence, and the reaction after the fact by the band themselves.

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the...

The U.S. Army Signal Corps Pictorial Division made this short documentary shortly after the end of WWII to look at the after-effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is no credited crew or cast.

This cinema-verite-style documentary interweaves the pregnancy and childbirth of a young woman with the lingering death of a cancer patient to comment on the celebration and tragedy of existence. The tenderness and intimacy of the young couple, and the mystery of birth are contrasted with the dignity of a man who faces his death without deception.

An early example of ultra-realism, this movie contrasts the quiet, bucolic life in the outskirts of Paris with the harsh, gory conditions inside the nearby slaughterhouses. Describes the fate of the animals and that of the workers in graphic detail.

During his adventure in Mexico, Sergei Eisenstein made footage of a Mexican "Death Day" celebration for inclusion in his "Que Viva Mexico!" film project. When the 200,000-plus feet of film he eventually exposed in Mexico was first attempted to be made into a feature film, "Thunder Over Mexico", the producers excluded the Death Day material for s...

Les Diaboliques is a Horror mystery thriller from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot about a triangle relationship that leads to murder.

A camera records the last moments in the life of a seagull on a polluted beach.

Denys Colomb de Daunant (1922 - 2006) is a writer, poet, photographer and filmmaker known for being the author and co-writer of the film Crin-Blanc (1952) directed by Albert Lamorisse. Highly symbolic character of the Camargue, aristocrat and dandy, he was also a manager and hotelier. He would lead the immemorial life of an animal herder if he d...

Au cours de l'exode de juin 1940 en France, un convoi de civils est mitraillé. Paulette, cinq ans, perd ses parents et se met à errer dans la campagne, serrant dans ses bras le cadavre de son chien. Dans les bois, elle rencontre Michel, un garçon de dix ans, qui l'emmène vivre dans la ferme de ses parents.

A documentary about the chemical and biological weapons developed and stored by the US.

Interviews with five former American soldiers who were present at the March 16, 1968 attack on the village of My Lai during the Vietnam War; they discuss the orders that were issued leading up to the attack, their expectations of what they would find there, and the subsequent massacre of the inhabitants and destruction of the village, as well as...

One of the first documentaries to focus on the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film gives voice to survivors of the atomic bombings and documents the long-term effects of radiation on their lives. Combining testimony with stark images of destruction and recovery, it serves as an early cinematic appeal against nuclear war.

This clear-eyed study of funeral services and crematoria reflects on how mass production methods and the impersonality of technological society have invaded even this last ritual. An accelerated sequence condenses the endless repetitions of identical funeral services, the arrivals and departures of mourners, into a few moments of sad comment. Th...

Bruce Conner's landmark experimental film consisting entirely of found footage edited to a new score.

The faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators in one continuous shot. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces stare into the empty space, in the 5:00 PM tiredness and mechanical impersonality, like faces from the grave.

Pigsty (Italian: Porcile) is a 1969 Italian film, written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marco Ferreri, Ugo Tognazzi, Pierre Clémenti, Alberto Lionello, Franco Citti, and Anne Wiazemsky. Its cinematographer is Tonino Delli Colli.

Newly arrived in Hollywood from England, Dennis Barlow finds he has to arrange his uncle's interment at the highly-organised and very profitable Whispering Glades funeral parlour. His fancy is caught by one of their cosmeticians, Aimee Thanatogenos. But he has three problems - the strict rules of owner Blessed Reverand Glenworthy, the rivalry of...

For three days in 1971, former US soldiers who were in Vietnam testify in Detroit about their war experiences. Nearly 30 speak, describing atrocities personally committed or witnessed, telling of inaccurate body counts, and recounting the process of destroying a village.

In this angry newsreel compilation of injustice against the oppressed, there occurs, without any particular preparation, a most shocking documentary sequence: the meticulously detailed, on-camera killing of a captured prisoner - possibly in the course of the Congo Crisis - who, cringing on the ground, has just been promised life. Since the outco...

A leading director of the Czech film renaissance provides a philosophical meditation on life and death, set amidst complex hospital apparatus and the sadness, hope, or resignation of the patients. Existentialist rather than optimist, the approach is one of humanistic atheism, accepting death as part of life. Interviews with doctors and nurses ex...

Two characters on a Noh stage dramatize the rite of love and death of Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama and his wife Reiko.

A tribute to Stan Brakhage's pet dog Sirius, whose decompostion was recorded over 6 months after he had died. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2010.