What Farocki Taught

Jill Godmilow (Far From Poland, Waiting for the Moon) in collaboration with Joanna Krakowska and Magda Mosiewicz pay homage to the original SCUM Manifesto, a French film made in 1976 by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig that was inspired by Valerie Solanas’s infamous text of the same name. Much like Solanas’s radical feminist text, SCUM Manifesto is a form of resistance and a call to action.

1974 documentary about symphony conductor Antonia Brico, including her struggle against gender bias in her profession.

Louise Nevelson was more than 60 by the time the art world acknowledged her as one of America’s greatest living sculptors. In her early years she had little money for materials, so she constructed her art out of discarded wood found abandoned in the streets of New York. Transformed, this unlikely raw material became the stuff of her famous black boxes and, later, the huge cubistic environmental art works which she innovated. For Godmilow’s 1977 film, Nevelson agreed for the first time to be filmed while she worked, during the creation of two major new sculptures, resulting in an invaluable document of her process. A charismatic and dynamic personality with an iconoclastic approach to life, Nevelson admits that her works are “really for my visual eye…a feast for myself.”

When Jill Godmilow’s documentary Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the number of AIDS-related deaths was reaching an all-time high in the United States (over 270,000). In New York City, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, many artists and filmmakers were grappling with the disease. While Broadway was hosting the second part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, downtown New Yorkers were fondly recalling another recent production, Ron Vawter’s one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which the actor, who died of AIDS in April 1994, performed two monologues, first as Cohn, the conservative lawyer, and secondly, as Smith, the flamboyant experimental filmmaker—both of whom died of AIDS-related causes in the late 1980s.

Fictionalized portrait of one of history's great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.

In a small community of steel workers, truck drivers, and teachers on the South Side of Chicago, a musical group called the Popovich Brothers maintained the traditional music and rich culture of their Serbian homeland by performing in local venues. By the 1970s, when this documentary was made, the Popovich Brothers had been performing for almost 50 years, bringing this music to new generations.

Made entirely by women - a group of young men and women have a cinema verite confessional about their most bizarre sexual experiences in a strange modern day Decameron.

Jill Godmilow's six-hour archive of The Mabou Mines ensemble's controversial 1990, gender-reversed production of William Shakespeare's King Lear documents the first two-week workshop on the play at the Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta. Director Lee Breuer and the cast are seen working on transposing the play to 1950's America in this intimate record of a master class in avant-garde performance work. Taken from over 100 hours of material, this condensed archive comes with a 32-page handbook with guides for tracking the production.

FAR FROM POLAND is probably the first American non-fiction film (Godmilow calls it a "drama-tary") to explode cinema verite's mythic claim to be the only trustworthy mode of representation for discussing the real world, and in particular, social and political issues, on film. Refused a visa to travel to Poland, "Jillski" (her Polish nickname in the film) has to literally re-invent the documentary to deal with the Polish situation and she does so with a particular eye to deconstructing not only documentary's specific claims to objectivity, but also the bourgeois audience's desire to sit comfortably in their seats, feel compassion, feel themselves part of the solution (not part of the problem) by having felt compassion for the poor oppressed Poles, who, Godmilow would argue, are far more acutely aware of their situation and what forces oppress them than the liberal American folk in the movie house.

A study of concert-artist Richard Dyer-Bennet at work on Homer's Odyssey - that is, developing a strategy for performing, in English, and in 1978, with harp in hand, this monumental 24 hour poem, which, in Homer's time and Homer's life, only existed in oral form - a long song, performed in public as entertainment and as tribal history.