Hamlet Within

Resistance

This bold film invites sustained, deep engagement as it works through a steady stream of ideas around the theme of resistance, both in its political and psychological manifestations. Artists Stuart Brisley and Marc Camille Chaimovicz assume the roles of historical figures from the French Resistance, and eventually reach breaking point as theatrical limits are met and breached.

There We Are John...

In this revealing documentary, Ken McMullen creates an elegant portrait of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, based on an interview conducted by John Cartwright. The questions are unobtrusive, allowing Jarman to reflect on his major films. Despite the debilitating effects of serious illness, we see an artist with his inner vision unimpaired; still humorous, self effacing and disarmingly charming.

1867

The French painter Edouard Manet painted four canvases depicting the execution in 1867 of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. This short dramatic film evokes the artist's studio and the events of Maximilian's death, using a single, uninterrupted shot to present the artistic thought process through the eyes of the painter. The narration, written by the film's director, takes the form of an imagined interior monologue, presented in voice-over style in French and German with English subtitles. It alludes to the narrative, historical and visual texts that Manet drew upon to form his four versions of the painting.

Zina

Zina, the daughter of Leon Trotsky by his first wife, is undergoing freudian analysis in Berlin in the 'thirties. Meanwhile Trotsky is in exile in Prinkipo having been driven from power by Stalin. The Nazis rise to power in Germany and Austria and Zina commits suicide.

Partition

The tumultuous events surrounding the sub-continent's partition in 1947 into India and Pakistan are re-imagined in Ken McMullen's complex and visually striking film. A lunatic asylum in the city of Lahore becomes a mirror image of events in the outside political world, with the same actors playing both inmates and rulers. Adapted by Tariq Ali and McMullen from famous Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto's short story 'Toba Tek Singh', Partition speaks for the countless millions that the usual British Raj films sweep out of sight. Released to mark the 60th anniversary of the partition of the Indian sub-continent, this is the film's first-ever release on DVD.

Ghost Dance

Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers an analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. The film focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who observes, 'I think cinema, when it's not boring, is the art of letting ghosts come back.' He also says that 'memory is the past that has never had the form of the present.'

1871

A young actress becomes politically aware within the Paris Commune of 1871.

Lucky Man

A profile and interview of director, Lindsay Anderson.

An Organization of Dreams

A disillusioned writer follows the intertwining stories of several people, but are they his own inventions or do they really exist?

Art, Poetry and Particle Physics

John Berger is one of our most celebrated and respected writers and broadcasters. A former winner of the Booker Prize, he also wrote one of the most influential books on art of our time, Ways of Seeing, which became a landmark documentary series on BBC Television. In Ken McMullen's engaging and accessible film, Art, Poetry and Particle Physics, he travels to the world's biggest particle physics laboratory at CERN in Geneva. The film charts an extraordinary and wide-ranging series of discussions and collaborations between Berger and the leading theoretical and experimental physicists John March Russell and Michael Doser.

Being and Doing

About Performance Art and its historical origins including its links with folk customs. The film includes extracts from the work of many different performance artists from England and abroad collected from 1979 to 1983, amongst them: Tibor Hajas (Hungary), Rasa Todosijevic (Yugoslavia), Iain Robertson (Scotland), Zbigniew Warpechowski (Poland), Milan Knizak (Czechoslovakia), Natalia LL (Poland), Ewa Partum (Poland), Jan Mlcoch (Czechoslovakia), Sonia Knox (Northern Ireland), Jerzy Beres (Poland) and Stuart Brisley (England). The film also records the Haxey Hood and Padstow Hobbyhorse folk dances from Lincolnshire and Cornwall respectively.