Children

Book of Days

This film is a rich and haunting reinvention of medieval life that never loses its contemporary perspective. When the plague afflicts a village, this world seems to go up in an apocalypse of hatred and disease that presages our own century.

Notre Musique

A three-chapter (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise) meditation on the city of Sarajevo in the wake of the Bosnian war, on Palestine and Israel, and on war itself.

Uncle Meat

This is a documentary about an unfinished movie. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention try to film the sci-fi epic "Uncle Meat."

Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mah Wah, NJ)

Schneemann's classic 1966 aerial "Kinetic Theatre" work was first staged at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, with eight performers moving to a score of randomized encounter on layers of rigged ropes and pulleys. One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version is enacted outdoors in trees and across the surface of a lake, in sequences directed by Schneemann.

A Horse Is Not a Metaphor

The filmmaker, fighting ovarian cancer, stage 3, returns to her experimental roots, in a multilayered film of numerous chemotherapy sessions with images of light and movement that take her far from the hospital bed. A a cancer ‘thriver’ rather than ’survivor’, Barbara Hammer rides the red hills of Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the grassy foothlls of the Big Horn in Wyoming, and leafy paths in Woodstock, New York changing illness into recovery. The haunting and wondrous music of Meredith Monk underscores and celebrates in this film that lifts us up when we might be most discouraged.

Pearls

With minimal tools and the limitation of a single image of a woman’s head a set of pearls activates a woman’s inner drive expressing freedom of movement. Animation suggests quickly a series of possible choices. The decision is ultimately hers. An animation exploring metamorphosis accompanied with music by Meredith Monk.

Turtle Dreams

Turtle Dreams, produced for WGBH-TV, originally aired September 2, 1983. Shot by Ping Chong. Composed by Meredith Monk, performed by her and her Vocal Ensemble.

Evolver

Evolver is a collective virtual reality experience which drops audiences deep inside the landscape of the body, following the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem to a single breathing cell.

Quarry

Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. This film version, shot on 16mm in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was created in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of their initiative to document ground-breaking live performance for future restaging. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. A unique document of this innovative, boundary-blurring production, and a work of art on its own terms, replete with a film-within-a-film directed by Monk in 1975.

Paris

A filming of Meredith Monk and Ping Chong's 1973 experimental theatre piece.

Turtle Dreams

Film by Robert Withers and Meredith Monk.

Rotation

Dancers rotate. Dancing shown from above. Black and white.

Hand Mandala

Five sets of hands form an ever-changing mandala.

Meredith Monk: Solo Concert 1980

A rare and powerful solo performance by one of the most important and original artists in the world. Recorded in 1980 at a studio out on Long Island, Meredith is in full voice, relaxed and creatively inspired by a small audience of Monk cogniscenti. Recorded with a 3-camera shoot and then put on the shelf, Tzadik is proud to present the first release of this astonishing virtuoso solo performance. Featuring acappella compositions as well as pieces where she accompanies herself on the piano, this is an intimate view of this remarkable and sensitive Renaissance woman.

Hand Reflection

Hands move in front of various surfaces.

Quarry

Like gnomes, dancers emerge from and hide again behind boulders. Not to be confused with Meredith Monk's 1978 opera of the same name.