Centre Georges Pompidou

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).

In 1931, Federico García Lorca was appointed director of the student theatre company Teatro Universitario "La Barraca" ('The Shack'). Funded by the Ministry of Education of the Second Republic, the company was tasked with touring rural areas of Spain to introduce audiences to classical Spanish theatre at no cost. Utilizing a portable stage and minimal equipment, the troupe aimed to bring theatrical performance to populations with no prior exposure, with García Lorca serving as both director and actor.

In 1906, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were 24 and 25 years old. The Butte Montmartre is their Parisian sanctuary where artists in need of recognition meet. Braque and Picasso become friends to the point of never leaving each other. For the moment, their paintings do not interest many people; only Apollinaire, then aged 26, and the young gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 22, saw immense potential in them. And in addition to their passion for painting, these four inseparable boys share the same appetite for modernity. Collages, diversions of materials and geometrization of forms: cubism opened the way to abstraction. A revolution initiated by Picasso and Braque, which profoundly changed the course of the history of modern art.

In this documentary, director Mariana Otero looks at the daily life of a college in the "difficult" commune of Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris.

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.

Jacques Rozier followed Bernard Ménez's tour in 1984 after the surprise success of his song "Jolie poupée". From a timecoded video in the possession of Jacques Rozier, post-production work was carried out in 2001 under the supervision of the director for his retrospective at the Center Pompidou. The element resulting from this work was digitized by the Cinémathèque française at the Hiventy laboratory in 2021.

An incident with his neighbor sends director Barbet Schroeder on a quest for inner peace.

An initiative from Pompidou Center, filmed by Jean Marie Straub.

Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.

"For reasons of health, Lee Kang-sheng and I moved to the mountains. We don't have any neighbors. Our house is part of a row of dilapidated houses. I love these abandoned houses. I often walk around in them casually. I think they are beautiful. I said to Lee Kang-sheng: we don't have to go elsewhere to make films anymore. I'll make all my remaining films right here. I got some old chairs and some of my paintings and arranged them in these abandoned houses. And thus, this film was made." Tsai Ming-liang

A video derived from footage Godard kept from his 1981 visit to Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios at the time he was making Passion.

In one of his very last projects, Raul Ruiz celebrates the films of his historical predecessor Jean Painlevé, a documentary innovator whose work always blended science with surrealism. Ruiz and friends further perfect the art of mystification. Why it is so difficult to count fish in an aquarium? Ruiz, his loyal actor Melvil Poupaud and his producer François Margolin come up with a wide range of hypotheses. With their bone-dry wit, they keep up the tradition of the French pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions. (IFFR)

In the fall of 1987, Philippe Haas accompanied the sculptor Richard Long to the Algerian Sahara and filmed him tracing with his feet, or constructing with desert stones, simple geometric figures (straight lines, circles, spirals). In counterpoint to the images, Richard Long explains his approach. Since 1967, Richard Long (1945, Bristol), who belongs to the land art movement, has traveled the world on foot and installed, in places often inaccessible to the public, stones, sticks and driftwood found in situ. His ephemeral works are reproduced through photography. He thus made walking an art, and land art an aspiration of modern man for solitude in nature.

Alongside André Kertész and Man Ray, Germaine Krull invented the New Vision in photography, an innovative way of seeing and revealing the modern world. Recognized by the art world as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century and a pioneer of photojournalism, Germaine Krull remains little known to the general public. Portrait of an artist, a great lover, and a free woman.

In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing merriment (entitled Beaubourg, la dernière Major !) audience members were invited to observe the daily making of this film, directed by Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, about an inexperienced young journalist (Laure Marsac) sent to the Pompidou to interview a maverick artistic impresario (Thomas Chabrol). The result is an unexpected love story that is also a record of this landmark exhibition, featuring cameos by Raul Ruiz, Paul Vecchiali, Luc Moullet and more !

A wordless portrait of sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins shows us the artist in the process of transforming clay into uncanny forms.

A dense work, citing everyone from Tarantino and Verhoeven to Artaud and Chaplin, made for Godard's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Voyage(s) en utopie.

Third part of the Jacques Toumoy trilogy.