Performance
see all genres ›A major attraction from cinema's earliest days was bringing to movie audiences live spectacles they might never be able to witness first-hand, from famous stage acts to world-class athletes and traditional ethnic dances.
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Genres / Short / Performance
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Take Off
Freaky and not a little transcendent, TAKE OFF takes the strip tease well past its usual climax. By sprinkling a little Georges Melies magic over the peep show motif, Gunvor Nelson simultaneously revels in cinema's earliest forms while exploding the medium's customary reliance on (and...Watch Movie
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A Study in Choreography for Camera
"If I did not live in a time when film was accessible to me as a medium, I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or a singer," the filmmaker Maya Deren once said. "But this is a much more marvelous dance. In film, I can make the world dance!" After college, Deren landed her first...Watch Movie
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Meditation on Violence
Haunting Chinese flute and Haitian drums accompany a graceful, elegant dance performance by Chao-Li Chi in Maya Deren's MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE. The film was released following the publication of her book, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film", and her winning the Grand...Watch Movie
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Place
PLACE is a sensational dance film, especially created for world-famous dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna by an outstanding team of international artists. Staged by Mats Ek, considered to be one of the world's best choreographers, and directed by Grammy, MTV and Cannes Grand Prix...Watch Movie
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Cet air-là
Cet Air là is a famous french song from 1963, sung live by NY singer April March in acapella with Julien Gasc. The couple is singing while flying over a superimposed 16mm projection of a stop motion animation of a series of clouds, birds, bubbles, smoke machines and glitter, the song has the...Watch Movie
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Bubble Dance
Famous exotic dancer Sally Rand does her signature routine in this classically scored short: a graceful, toga-clad dance with a buoyant balloon bigger than she is. Finally, we get the payoff when backlighting obscures her sheer dress, revealing the voluptuous naked form beneath. Rand's act was...Watch Movie
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Honesty
The pioneering director Mark Pellington first came to prominence during MTV's golden age of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Creating a style led by the innate emotion of music and the darker side of pop culture, his zeitgeist-defining videos take in the hypnotic roaming buffalos of U2's "One,"...Watch Movie
