The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is a performing arts venue in Brooklyn, New York City, known as a center for progressive and avant-garde performance. It presented its first performance in 1861 and began operations in its present location in 1908. The Academy is incorporated as a New York State not-for-profit corporation. It has 501(c)(3) status.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct Cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
Jonas Mekas was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas' work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.
Adolfas Mekas was a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, director, editor, actor and educator. With his brother Jonas Mekas, he founded the magazine Film Culture, as well as the Film-Makers' Cooperative and was associated with George Maciunas and the Fluxus art movement at its beginning. He made several short films, culminating in the feature Hallelujah the Hills in 1963, which was played at the Cannes Film Festival of that year and is now considered a classic of American film.
Tarnation is a 2003 American documentary film by Jonathan Caouette. The film was created by Caouette from over 20 years of hundreds of hours of old Super 8 footage, VHS videotape, photographs, and answering machine messages to tell the story of his life and his relationship with his mentally ill mother Renee.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at College of Staten Island (CSI) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Jonathan Caouette is an American film director, writer, editor and actor.
Shirley Clarke was an American filmmaker.
MIX NYC is a not-for-profit organization based in New York City and dedicated to queer experimental film. It is also known as the "MIX festival," for its most visible program, the annual New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (NYLGEFF), which has featured early works by filmmakers such as Christine Vachon, Todd Haynes, Isaac Julien, Thomas Allen Harris, Barbara Hammer, Jonathan Caouette, Jennie Livingston, and Matthew Mishory.
Milestone Film and Video is an independent film distribution company, founded in 1990 in the United States by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller. The company researches and distributes cinematographic material from around the world, including silent film, post-war foreign film renaissance, contemporary American independent features, documentaries and foreign films.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
The Film-Makers' Cooperative a.k.a. legal name The New American Cinema Group, Inc. is an artist-run, non-profit organization incorporated in July of 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, Lloyd Michael Williams and other filmmakers for the distribution, education and exhibition of avant-garde films and alternative media.
Lupita Amondi Nyong'o is a Kenyan-Mexican actress. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, a Daytime Emmy Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. She has received nominations for a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Tony Award.
Portrait of Jason is a 1967 documentary film directed, produced and edited by Shirley Clarke and starring Jason Holliday.
Stations of the Elevated is a 1981 documentary film by Manfred Kirchheimer about graffiti in New York City. It debuted at the New York Film Festival. It was re-released June 27, 2014, and shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was re-released throughout the United States in the fall of 2014. Reviews were generally positive.
Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film Christmas on Earth.
Jason Holliday was an American hustler and nightclub performer. He is the star of Shirley Clarke's 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason.
Fraud is a 2016 conceptual documentary film directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp. The film is made up of re-edited homevideos uploaded to YouTube. It tells the fictional story of an average white American family of four obsessively shopping at Big Box stores until their increasing mountain of debt leads them to go to extremes in order to wipe the slate clean and keep the money flowing.
Signals Through the Flames is a 1983 documentary film on the work of Julian Beck and Judith Malina as the founders of The Living Theatre performance company. The title of the film is taken from the work of Antonin Artaud in his book on theatre theory called The Theatre and its Double. The film was produced by Mystic Fire Video as a project of the now defunct Mystic Fire Video bookstore in New York City. It was directed and edited by Sheldon Rochlin.
Skyscraper is a 1959 documentary film by Shirley Clarke about the construction of the 666 Fifth Avenue skyscraper.
