Gavin Bryars

To Tea, made in Holland (at the house of the Dutch avant-garde filmmaker Franz Zwartjes), is a slowed ‘Alice in Roomland’.A guide to sensual contact between two women. Their contact is arrived at through an arrangement of slow tactics. As the light of day goes the bodies come closer, and the piano melody floats in a distant hall. Once my Hungarian art teacher said: “If you exaggerate the objective lines you reach a stronger subjective expression.” So here the strange tea party gives over to touch. – S.D.

The supremely world-weary Lemmy Caution, last seen in Godard's "Alphaville" (France/1965), has several strange encounters while trying to make his way from the former East Germany to "the west."

Frankenstein's monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa.

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson’s ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he confronts a hectic work schedule, funding difficulties and relentless international travel in attempt to complete his preparations. The film examines Wilson’s unique theatrical style during The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which involves the continual creation of evocative stage sets, owing to a unique juxtaposition of movement, sound, text and image. Known for his precise, painterly images Wilson’s work derives more from visual art than the orthodox literary traditions of theatre. As a result, Wilson often challenges actors to perform in a boldly minimalist style, as well as collaborating with non-actors, such as young autistic poet Christopher Knowles in Einstein on the Beach.

'Dyn Amo' is a 'drama' exploring the distinction between a person's self and his projection of that self to others; and it's a 'horror movie' tragically suggesting how a projection can become more substantial than the self behind it. Its subjects are role-playing (especially sexual role-playing), and the masochism of playing a role that conforms to others' exploitative interests.

A man walks towards the camera down the end of a street to the sound of 'Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet', a composition by Gavin Bryars based on a loop of an anonymous homeless man singing the song. The man’s voice is progressively intensified by an instrumental accompaniment, which increases in density and richness, before the whole thing gradually fades out. Dwoskin’s film was produced to be shown during the premiere of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in December 1972. For Dwoskin, it represents “… the singing voice of the last days of a London drunk (anonymous) as the orchestra raises him to heaven. The faint ghost image of a figure swims gradually to you through the grains of film low light…”

Botticelli's Venus emerges from the waters, that of Yvan Lagrange, is she shipwrecked?...

A portrait of a relationship between a physically disabled man and an able-bodied woman.