Lax Readings

The musicians of the ‚Art Ensemble of Chicago’ have been performing their portrayal of jazz from past and present since 1967, not unlike a journey backwards in time aroused by an ancestral call to the myths of Africa. But what happens before their concerts? NULL SONNE NO POINT is the magnificent chronicle of the preparation for a concert and invites us into the very heart of the music, following the musicians backstage, at their rehearsals and moments of privacy and concentration, seeking the fluctuating emotions before the music begins.

Robert Lax (1915-2000) was a poet with a singular vision and style whose quest to live an authentic life as both an artist and a spiritual seeker inspired Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, William Maxwell and countless others. Known in the U.S. primarily as Merton’s best friend and in Europe as a daringly original avant-garde poet, Lax lived a life of simplicity, humility and grace that continues to encourage and motivate readers and followers. This film is a portrait of Robert Lax as he was to those who were fortunate to visit him during his thirty years of living on the Greek island of Patmos.

An avant-garde documentary film on English guitarist, composer and improviser Fred Frith.

A film that ressembles a dream. Shot over a period of several years, it is composed of fragments of memory and moments of life woven together to create a sequence of microscopic stories. “Vagabonding Images” is a film that plays with the forms of cinematic language inspired by the poetic collage techniques of the French Surrealists and Japanese Haiku poets.

Philip, Max, and Julia Rossmann are brothers and sister. Out of their own life, they try to continue childhood bonds. Through their entanglement in a mysterious event, the three are torn apart. For each, a new beginning. The film begins a year later. Quite impulsively, Philip Rossmann leaves his hide-out to go and look for his lost brother. He meets former friends with whose help he tries to reconstruct his brother's trail. Despite the setbacks his research brings, he is able to track down his brother. They meet.

Filmmakers Nicolaus Humbert and Werner Penzel examine the nature of nomadic existence in this documentary, from the literal nomads of North Africa to the more metaphorical kind of wanderer, such as American poet and ex-pat Robert Lax. Humbert and Penzel focus especially on the nomad's paradoxical ability to fully inhabit every moment while remaining coolly detached from specific locales and anxious thoughts about the past or future.

People's associations with flora goes back a long way, taking us back to our own roots as well as to new ways of life and creative potential that reveal themselves as we deal with plants.

Filmed in Patmos in May 1999, this is Robert Lax’s last year in Greece, roughly his last year of life. For 21 minutes you see only Lax’s head and his right hand, which holds a wooden staff of sorts (a walking stick or ... a broomstick?!). He wears a navy blue knit hat. The only movement is in his eyes, and ever so slight movements of his head. Lax does not look at the camera, his eyes are mostly downcast, but he is awake and aware, watching and waiting, and you are drawn into his profound stillness. All of those who were able to meet Lax during his lifetime consider it a particular stroke of fortune. They say that from that point on he became part of their bodies and souls, as though they had met a true saint. My Eye Your Eye is like being in the presence of holiness. For 20 minutes. Watching and waiting. I've always wanted to know better what Bob Lax was like - how he was. This film does it.

In May of 1982 Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean writer and his companion in life, Carol Dunlop set out in their VW bus on a journey along the highway from Paris to Marseille that, for each of them, was to be their final one. Twenty-five years later, Océane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave set out to undertake the journey again.

What story is hidden in the stranded suitcase full of pictures, sounds and letters whose origins we do not know? The film is an homage to cinema, a film poem made up of images between dream and reality; a network of sounds, text fragments and voices that leads far out into the world and at the same time close to us. Aren’t we all floating islands?

Wonderland is a joint project by the Parisian band Das Kapital with Edward Perraud on drums, Hasse Poulsen on guitar, and Daniel Erdmann on saxophone and the filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Martin Otter.

The path to Yusef Lateef was a journey into the unknown. We were aware that he is one of the great maestros of jazz and one of the last of his generation still alive. In an era of black culture that probably found its strongest form of expression in music, he was a contemporary and companion of those musicians who helped to shape and renew jazz: John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley. Now, at the age of 84, Yusef Lateef lives withdrawn in his house in the woods somewhere in New England – in a room full of musical instruments. He still plays his saxophone today, as he has done for most of his life. (Humbert & Penzel)

The highway, revisited. Years later. Transformation of a locale. A place of mobility that, in the meantime, has become a place of silence.

From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really changed?" We requested them to tell us a story to illustrate their reply, and we filmed them.

A surrealist tribute to The Rolling Stones.

Wanted! Hanns Eisler is a filmic and musical search for traces; an approach to Eisler's life as a homeless wanderer between worlds and his work, which retains its charisma and inspires subsequent generations of artists to new musical experiments.