Helmut Herbst

A cloud of black dust, one of white dust, and the world.

A “film-noir” on double identity and role reversal. A man is looking for a woman to love. He finds her in a seedy bar and persuades her to marry him. The day she decides to flee… he kills her. To ward off suspicion, he moves in with the sister of the deceased.

Figures in a side-scrolling landscape.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

An essayistic documentary about the action art movement that emerged in the 1960s: In interviews with various action artists, including Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow, director Helmut Herbst illuminates the performative and participatory tendencies in art that began in the 1960s and outlines the diversity of motives and strategies.

The year was 1972. A commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals set adrift in space in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Based on Herbst's 1974 animated sci-fi film DIE PHANTASTISCHE WELT DES MATTHEW MADSON.

Astronaut Mulligan sets out to find a mysterious planet.

This documentary concerns the contributions of German artists to the Dadaist movement. Created in 1916, the organizers rejected previous convention and delighted in nihilistic satire in painting, sculpture and literature. Comparisons are made between the movement and the political and social upheaval at the time of the release of this feature (1969).