The Man Without a World

The Man Without a World

One of the most unusual, artistic and fantastic films of the American Indie history. There is nothing else like it!

1991 · 98 min · ★ 3.7 · Drama

The Man Without a World is credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director, Yevgeny Antinov. But the film is anything but old. In fact, Antinov himself is the creation of contemporary filmmaker Eleanor Antin. Her film is a moving, comic melodrama set in a typical shtetl (village) in Poland. The Jews’ struggle against poverty and racial hatred is complicated by their own division into hostile political factions of the religious orthodoxy, assimilationists, socialists, Zionists, anarchists and survivors. While the Jews of the shtetl pursue their loves, politics, religion, business and dreams for the future, the Angel of Death is ever near...

Directed by Eleanor Antin · Written by Eleanor Antin

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The Man Without a World

Citizen X

A close match in mood and era.

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Representational Painting

Representational Painting · 1971

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The artist explores make-up as a traditional mode of self-expression, using it to find a representation of herself with which to face the world.

The Pink Biennal

The Pink Biennal · 1976

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The King

The King · 1972

Writes Antin: "Applying hair to her face, the artist moves through a variety of bearded faces seeking the identity most appropriate to her facial structure and satisfying to her aspirations." Antin transforms herself into a man and adopts one of her recurring performance personae, "The King."

The Last Night of Rasputin

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Billed as "the final orgy and dreadful end of the notorious monk, Rasputin, on the eve of the Russian Revolution," THE LAST NIGHT OF RASPUTIN tells a story of pre-revolutionary Russia. Rasputin, confidante of the Tsarina, storms through St. Petersburg in endless orgies and bachannales. Into the aristocratic decadence come three friends from the productive classes - a worker, a student and a ballerina. The troika fall victim to evil doers but heroically triumph in the end.

The Adventures of a Nurse (Parts I and II)

The Adventures of a Nurse (Parts I and II) · 1976

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Part I: The artist, in the role of a nurse, fantasizes on romantic themes, using a set of foot-high, hand-painted paper dolls as actors. A fantasy within a fantasy. The "Nurse Eleanor" paper doll performs as a surrogate self for Nurse Eleanor Antin and is the much put-upon but brave heroine of a succession of romances with a dying poet, a biker, and a doctor. Part II: "Nurse Eleanor's" romantic odyssey continues with two new lovers — a French ski bum and an anti-war senator.

From the Archives of Modern Art

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In this work of documentary fiction, an archivist attempts to put together the "lost years" of Eleanor Antinova, the once-celebrated black ballerina of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, when she returned to her native America to eke out a meager living in vaudeville and early cinema. Eleanor Antin uses fictional characters, autobiography, and narrative to invent histories and explore what she calls "the slippery nature of the self".

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