Destricted

Noé explores the line where art meets sexuality, and does so in a very simplistic form of expression.

A girl dances in her bedroom.

A girl dances and expresses herself in her bedroom.

After the birth of his baby daughter Cynthia, a Parisian horse butcher soon finds himself abandoned, responsible to raise and care for his newborn girl, completely on his own. Moreover, as his little girl grows into an adolescent, nothing much seems to change in the butcher's life, who day in, day out, experiences the same numbing and tedious repetition, up until Cynthia's first signs of puberty. Under those circumstances and after a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, the butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.

A vibrant essay on respect for beliefs, the actor’s craft and the art of filmmaking.

After a volcano, a small village from where no one can escape. The plague spreads, and among the survivors, the famine rules. For a piece of bread, Charlotte sleeps with the grocer. Night falls. The cliffs, someone is watching…

Gaspar Noé's short film for "Short Plays" (2014).

Noé has now re-edited the film in chronological order, adopting the victim’s point of view more directly. Irréversible – inversion intégrale is more than a new version of a cult work, it’s a new and terribly contemporary film about violence against women.

"Shoot" a short film by Gaspar Noé for the project "Short plays".

A family living in Marfa, Texas attempts to pull themselves back together after a horrific tragedy. This provocative sequel to Larry Clark's film Marfa Girl, shows us a group of people ready to escape their current realities - no matter the cost. Gritty, unrelenting and powerful, auteur Clark once again delivers a bleak landscape of sex, drugs and boredom amongst the residents of a dead-end Texas Border town.

After finding himself at the constant abuse of his best friend Bobby, Marty has become fed up with his friend's twisted ways. His girlfriend, a victim of Bobby's often cruel ways, couldn't agree more and they strategize murdering Bobby.

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.

A controversial portrayal of teens in New York City which exposes a deeply disturbing world of sex and substance abuse. The film focuses on a sexually reckless, freckle-faced boy named Telly, whose goal is to have sex with as many different girls as he can. When Jenny, a girl who has had sex only once, tests positive for HIV, she knows she contracted the disease from Telly. When Jenny discovers that Telly's idea of "safe sex" is to only have sex with virgins, and is continuing to pass the disease onto other unsuspecting girls, Jenny makes it her business to try to stop him.

In a post-apocalyptic future mankind is lives in a prehistoric manner. After killing his father for sexually assaulting his girlfriend, the son of a tribal leader runs away with a group of his teenage friends. They are taken in by Neil and Judith who introduce them to the vices outlawed by their tribes namely sex and drugs.Neil and Judith, however, are genetically altered indestructible mutants who have their own plans for the future of the human race.

Larry Clark ("Kids", "Bully"), in keeping with the tradition of his previous short in the film "Destricted" combining art and sex, JONATHAN (Jonathan Velasquez of "Paranoid Park", "Wassup Rockers" and "The Moving Men") tells the story of a young man of 14 recalling his first sexual experience and is seen later at 21, with a girl of experience.

Instead of adhering to the norms of their South Central neighborhood, a group of skater boys opt to bus into Hollywood and Beverly Hills, where they attract local rich girls - and plenty of trouble with the police, jealous boyfriends, and nervous parents.

Paris. Gabrielle and Enzo, two teenagers from the same gang, meet in front of the school. Cigarettes, the affirmation of sexual desire and the discovery of new drugs punctuate their day. Each one, in his own way, celebrates or laments childhood that is slipping away.

A vending machine robbery by small time thief and drug addict Bobbie (Vincent Kartheiser) goes badly awry, and his friends contact street-wise thief and part-time druggie Mel (James Woods) to patch him up.Recognizing a kindred spirit, Mel befriends Bobbie and his girlfriend Rosie (Natasha Gregson Wagner), inviting them to join him and his long-suffering girlfriend Sid (Melanie Griffith) on a drug robbery which should set them up for life. The seemingly simple robbery is a great success, but the sale of the drugs afterward fails badly, and Mel and Bobbie are shot.The four take refuge with the Reverend, who charges them half of their haul from the robbery to care for them. In a desperate attempt to recover their losses, Mel involves the crew in a disastrous, ill-advised jewellery robbery, and they become caught up in a web of violence that rapidly spirals out of control.

A disaffected Texas teen spends his 16th birthday getting high, hanging out and having casual sex.

The multi-channel video installation HalfLife juxtaposes surveillance footage of video gamers in cyber-cafés playing the popular video game, ‘Counter-Strike’, with a live video feed of the game they are playing. The surveillance channel shows their expressions from the cross-hairs’ point-of-view while the game engine channel captures their virtual actions inside the game-world and presents the interplay and interactivity between both.

Inspired by Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), Superstar was commissioned by Creative Time to be presented on the Jumbotron screen in Times Square, New York City. The subject appears perpetually frozen in time while the document of the moment itself slowly descends. Filmed in a pre-Matrix era, the performance in Superstar was captured with 180 cameras mounted in a 360 degree ring that show a 1/500 second wedge of time.

Shot from the point of view of a passenger aircraft, Getaway begins with an aerial view of a generic industrial district and ends with a landing on the main runway at Los Angeles’s LAX airport. The video is presented on a small LCD screen in a plastic setting designed after a 1970s Pan Am airline tray—a relic from a time when passengers could fly in style

The history of humankind is illustrated as a vast side-scrolling video mural depicting the spectacle of human conflict across time through the lens of cinema.

'Sync' is made up of sampled images from sex scenes in mainstream and adult films. The formulaic and often derivative nature of the way this subject is interpreted in cinema is emphasised, creating a strong subliminal impression which gradually builds to a state of sensory overload. 'Sync' uses samples as short as single frames edited together to create the impression of motion. The original continuity and narrative in the source material is eliminated, and a new visual choreography emerges.

After a plane crash, two opposing half-brothers find themselves on an amazing lost island where enlightened pacifist humans and intelligent talking dinosaurs have created a utopian medieval society. But imminent disaster approaches.

Film footage of Sylvester Stallone in Brambilla's 1993 debut feature-film, Demolition Man, is re-photographed through the gate of a 35mm projector and presented as the Sequel. The movement of the film gradually begins to slow until the light from the projector lamp begins to disintegrate the celluloid film.

Set against a stark, monochromatic background with a hairless Poly as the centerpiece, the video gives you an unsettling feeling that something disturbing is stirring beneath her initial placidity. Poly then takes us through a range of emotions of what can only be described as a carthartic episode before ending on the same unnerving note it began with. Brambilla composes the video brilliantly, creating mesh-like layers of Poly’s face that scatter and converge as he explores the idea of mulitplicity within the human psyche.

In the carnival act “Wall of Death,” first performed in the 1930s, a motorcyclist rides around the inside of a wooden drum, maintaining a delicate state of equilibrium between centrifugal force and gravity. The video is made up of a series of motion loops that become progressively shorter, creating the illusion of continuous motion: The rider is caught in a never-ending, never decelerating circle. The editing technique, inspired by the Kinetoscope films popular during the time the act was widely performed.

Filmed in 35mm at nine revolving restaurants across North America—including ones in Seattle, Las Vegas, St. Louis, and New York—Cyclorama presents nine panoramas side by side in a cylindrical enclosure that mimics the restaurants’ architecture, creating the sense of one continuous, moving landscape. The sun rises at the same moment on each screen, erasing time zones and providing a 360-degree view of the Western horizon.

A "video action" in which Barney crosses the ceiling of the Gladstone Gallery using a harness and ice-climbing screws, propelling himself by the forces of muscle and will.

CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore ...

In September 2021, Barney and Bepler presented a live performance at Schaulager titled ‘Catasterism in Three Movements.’ CATASTERISM draws from documentation of those performances and expands the narrative with cinematic scenes filmed in the galleries and workspaces of Schaulager. The film elaborates on the characters’ private rituals and deploys forensic examinations of artworks within Schaulager to evoke connections between the material qualities of art objects and the ephemeral qualities of the music. The project continues Barney’s and Bepler’s long history of collaborative projects with distinguished musicians in experimental and unconventional settings.

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto

CREMASTER 2 (1999) is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1 ...

Matthew Barney, in a harness suspended from the ceiling, leaps around a room and lowers himself onto gobs of petroleum jelly.

The goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. The characters communicate through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.

Presented as part of the exhibition "RIVER OF FUNDAMENT", Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Hesitation to recover a dropped pearl results in a delay-of-game penalty play.

Ulay and Abramović take turns hitting each other in the face, gradually increasing speed and intensity with each blow. This performance is best known for being the inspiration for New Order's "True Faith" music video.

Marina Abramovic's performance 'Relation in time', with her long time partner Ulay. "We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair, without any movement for 16 hours. Then the audience came in. We continued sitting for one hour."

In a small house with oversized furniture, located in a rice field in Asia, some children wearing army clothes and weapons, start playing war, creating between each other two armies and using children's toys, laser weapons, machine guns and helicopters. Slowly, as the game progresses, they start imitating war scenes as seen on TV, such as negotiations and death scenes. At the end of the film, the children are coming out of the house and they deposit their weapons in front of it. The smallest child comes out in the end with a burning bramble stick in his hand and lights the pile of weapons. All the children leave while the pile is burning. In over twenty countries around the world, children are direct participants in war. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces in current armed conflicts. Dangerous Games is a work of fiction.

7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a continuation of Marina Abramovic's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century as her life was beset by struggle and scandal. Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer's most important roles - in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Norma - followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself.

The video tape shows the half-length portraits of Abramović and her husband Ulay standing opposite each other, looking at each other and producing a long sound with open mouths.

"Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose which one of us to face" – Marina Abramovich

Combining video, performance art, documentary, and tableau vivant, this short piece set in what appears to be part of the Ayutthaya Ruins in Bangkok, Thailand, begins with a panoramic shot of various Thai folks dressed in traditional garb and sleeping in the grass as a woman narrates. The rest of the piece is broken into six unbroken shots of these individuals in still poses depicting both some aspect of Thai life as well as suggesting its disquieting alienation from modernity, as the same woman narrator now sings. The final shot is again of the ensemble sleeping, suggesting that the previous montage was, indeed, a collective dream.

Balkan Erotic Epic explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.

I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat 'Art must be beautiful', 'Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face.

20 short films about human rights.

Sigh was made in collaboration with the BBC Concert Orchestra and features a score made especially for it by Academy-Award winning composer Anne Dudley. Dudley comments, 'When I was composing this piece I had in mind Sam's wonderful large photographs from her series Wuthering Heights. This gave me the sense of loss that would transform onto the members of the orchestra as they played without their instruments. I knew that the sound of each section had to come from the right screen and this allowed me to think about the music travelling around the room. Also, I wanted the listener to be able to move around the room and experience a different perspective of sound – very much like strolling through an orchestra. All the sections rely on each other to complete the soundscape and avoid a greater loss.' Eight-screen projection.

The title of this piece is the well-known warning of Jesus to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection. It translates to Touch me not. This biblical scene gave birth to a strong iconographical tradition in Christian art, from late antiquity to present. Here, the denial of hope and redemption is removed from its religious context. 16mm film. Dual-screen projection.

A man masturbates in the desert.

2003 Sam Taylor-Wood video art work featuring a tap dancer

Informed by cinematic and documentary traditions, Taylor-Johnson has been working with photography, film and video in London since the early 1990s. She presents characters in situations of isolation and self-absorption, their familiar, even mundane, surroundings and poses belying more or less hidden states of emotional crisis. This piece explores the difficult distinctions 'between reality and unreality, life and theatre', public and private, by putting the viewer in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether the action is genuine or staged. This discomfort persists with Brontosaurus, which is clearly taking place in a private space.

1996 Sam Taylor-Wood video art piece focusing on a naked singer

The drama tells the story of Lennon's teenage years and the start of his journey to becoming a successful musician. The story also examines the impact on his early life and personality of the two dominant females in his childhood

A biopic centered on English singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse.

A string quartet, dressed in black tie, seated in an arc that curves away from the viewer, play part of Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 2 in F major Op. 22. The piece is titled Andante ma non Tanto (which, crudely translated, means faster, but not too much). They sit in the sumptuous surroundings of the Crush Room at the Royal Opera House, London. Above them suspended by wires, which flick in and out of view as the light catches them, is a ballet dancer. He is naked apart from shorts and the harness. The dancer rests just above the musicians' heads as they play Tchaikovsky's melancholic piece. The dancer moves rhythmically and slowly, his feet almost brushing their bows as they play. 35mm film. Single-screen projection.

The graceful, ephemeral longing highlighted in this work is brought back down to earth with the title – after Van Halen's Jump. Single-screen projection.

An animated film rich in colour and action drawn on top of a print of an X-rated film.

Movements of female mouths licking candy and cake decoration.