Meditate and Destroy is a documentary about punk rock, spirituality, and inner rebellion about the best-selling author of Dharma Punx and Against the Stream, Noah Levine. This powerful film offers an up-close look at how the driving forces in Noah’s life changed from violence, addiction and rebellion to the role of dedicated meditation teacher and community leader. Tattoos, motorcycles, engaging music, inner peace and Buddha all come together in an inspiring story that opens our perception to the possibilities of finding new paths – even in our darkest hours.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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theEYE is a series of interview-based profiles of contemporary visual artists. Each film provides a thought-provoking survey of an artist’s work and ideas, featuring the artist in discussion and illustrated by sequences captured of key exhibitions and installations around the world.

The beautifully produced films offer a rare and personal insight into the influences and creative processes that lie behind the artist’s creations, and provide an accessible means of engaging with the pleasures and puzzles of art in the 21st century.

An excellent introduction to contemporary artists and their works, theEYE is an ideal resource for a wide range of audience, including galleries, museums and colleges, as well as the individual art-lover.

NOTE: All DVDs from theEYE Series are in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

Anthony Caro
Tracey Emin
Gilbert and George
Howard Hodgkin
Anish Kapoor
Malcolm Morley
Chris Ofili
Rachel Whiteread

To purchase all eight titles in theEYE Series: $499.00

In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colors, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be.

At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail of an extensive retrospective at Tate. Preparations for the show are featured in this profile, along with many of his major works, filmed in Britain, Germany and the United States.

In interview Anthony Caro speaks about the development of his art from the bronze figures of the 1950s through the many variations of his work with metals, his hybrids of sculpture and architecture, and his recent large-scale, multi-part responses to Old Master painting and the worlds of myth and Christianity. The film is a portrait of an artist of great distinction whose inventiveness and creative vigor are undiminished.

Anthony Caro Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Although at times obscured by the artist’s celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focused, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity.

Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998), are illustrated and discussed, as is a wide selection of drawings, prints, paintings, neons, appliqué blankets and installations.

“I always say if I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead,” she reflects. “But let’s be more realistic about that. If I didn’t make art and I’d done well in life, then I might have gone into retail. I would probably be the person in the shop that would be always organizing the displays, and always making the noticeboard look nice in the canteen, stuff like that. I’m a genuinely creative person.”

Please note that this video contains explicit images and adult language featured in artworks by Tracey Emin.

Tracey Emin Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Gilbert Prousch met George Passmore at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967. Since then they have famously lived and worked together as Gilbert & George, creating an extraordinary body of provocative artworks. They have exhibited themselves as “Living Sculptures”, documented the banality of their daily lives in London’s East End, and, since the late 1970s, produced vibrant, challenging photographic collages.

This video profile of Gilbert & George features a characteristically deadpan performance of themselves. Sex, money, race and religion, they explain, are four themes at the heart of their art. Their interview is complemented by images of many of their works, including the remarkable Dirty Words Pictures made in 1977, together with important collages of the 1980s and 1990s.

Asked if their work, and their personas, are ironic, Gilbert says, ” We always think it’s struggle enough to drag something out from inside of ourselves onto that wall without trying to be strange or odd about it. We wanted to be absolutely painful truth,” George adds. “I really believe it has to be painful.”

“1980’s The World of Gilbert and George is really only interesting as an unwitting document of its time, but theEYE, an extended interview on the pair, is fascinating…”
-Guardian Guide, February 2007

Gilbert and George Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Howard Hodgkin is one of the world’s leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly colored, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an awareness of history and an understanding of art’s potential today. Most recently, his interest in working in different scales, evident particularly in significantly larger paintings such as Americana and After Vuillard, demonstrates his concern to engage the viewer in new and challenging ways.

In this interview, illustrated with many key paintings, Howard Hodgkin speaks with warmth and passion about how his methods, about his influences, about color and composition, and about the fundamental importance of painting. “You need things to look at,” he says simply, “things to affect your feelings, and your intelligence, and your heart.”

Howard Hodgkin Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

In October 2002 Anish Kapoor completed his extraordinary sculpture Marsyas for The Unilever Series of commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. A challenging and overwhelming artwork, Marsyas is a vast red PVC membrane stretched between three massive steel rings. The title refers to a satyr in Greek mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo.

This film follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the complex installation at Tate. Anish Kapoor comments on each stage of the process, and on the ideas and concerns of his art. Also illustrated are a range of his other sculptures and two recent large-scale works: Sky Mirror in Nottingham and Taratantara, created for the empty shell of Baltic as this new art center was being built in Gateshead.
 
 
 
 
 
Anish Kapoor Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Malcolm Morley is one of the most significant and influential painters working today. Born in England but active in the United States since the late 1950s, Morley has developed an intensely individual vision embracing, but never determined by, autobiography, politics, psychoanalysis, myth, the visual culture of his time and the limitless potential of paint.

Filmed as Morley works in his distinctive manner on a spectacular new canvas, this documentary features the artist’s provocative reflections on his life, painting technique, influences and concerns. It also illustrates a wide range of his paintings from the earliest abstract works, through the painstakingly precise depictions of reproductions (on postcards, from travel brochures) of ships, contemporary scenes and Old Masters, to the catastrophe pictures of the 1970s.

Paintings engaging with ancient cultures followed, and then works based on the cardboard cut-out airplane and boat kits which Morley has made since his youth. Most recently, he has returned to paintings of news photographs, exploring a striking and challenging new range of imagery.

Malcolm Morley Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

In 2003 Chris Ofili created the spectacular installation within reach for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Combining a cycle of paintings depicting lovers in a Paradise-like garden with a shimmering glass dome, Ofili plunged visitors into disorienting spaces of dense color and enveloping light.

Shot in London, Germany and Venice, this film relates the creation of Within Reach. Chris Ofili’s reflections on the process are complemented by interviews with his collaborator in Venice, architect David Adjaye, and the structural engineer from Arup Associates, who helped realize the complex dome.

Also included is an exploration of The Upper Room, an installation of 13 exquisite canvases by Ofili, which was first shown in 2002. Both this and Within Reach are about “trying to create an atmosphere for people to feel somehow out of themselves.” His aim, the artist explains, is to “do something that is sincerely interesting and can honestly enhance the experience of looking.”

Chris Ofili Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Rachel Whiteread has created some of the most remarkable and resonant public sculptures of recent years. House (now demolished) cast in concrete the interior of a terraced house in London’s East End. Holocaust Memorial is a moving memorial in Vienna to the victims of the holocaust in Austria. Yet she also frequently works on a domestic scale, casting in plaster and resin the spaces inside, around and beneath furniture, floors and staircases. Her art is a uniquely poetic response to the everyday, and to the haunting themes of memory and mortality.

In this video profile Rachel Whiteread speaks about the ideas that prompted a number of her best-known sculptures, including Ghost, her first cast of the space inside a complete room, and Monument, which established a shimmering presence in London’s Trafalgar Square during the summer of 2001. She also outlines the complexities of creating her often technically challenging works, and reflects on the controversies that they have sometimes set off.
 
 
 
Rachel Whiteread Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Fenton Bailey’s Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation offers a comprehensive, detailed examination of the origins and transformations of adult media. This six-part series contains commentary from a multitude of sources, including art historians, social critics, authors, collectors, and adult stars themselves. The film tastefully tackles the taboo subject by focusing on pornography’s implications of human nature, the impact of technological advances and social evolution.
 
The Road to Ruin

At the site of Pompeii, once buried under the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, archeologists were astonished to find obscene adult paintings on the walls of each villa. These first forms of pornography were once not considered a form of vulgarity at all, but rather tasteful works of art found in any refined home. The Road to Ruin examines the controversy over the public exhibition of these ancient artifacts that were long hidden in undisclosed museum archives. Featured experts Dr. Simon Goldhill, Prof. John Clark, Dr. David Gaimster and others argue that our present-day conception of pornography did not descend from the sexually accepting Greeks, but rather the more conservative Victorian culture.
 
The Sacred and the Profane

The arrival of Christianity led to the condemnation of pornographic images and sexual acts. Images of copulation and phallic symbols in art became associated with demons and sin, resulting in firm censorship. The discovery of the printing press further complicated the circulation of adult images among those who were deemed ‘unworthy’ of them. The Sacred and the Profane details the historical events that led to selective distribution of pornography due to class differences and religiously driven cultures of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Roger S. Wieck, Edward Lucie-Smith, Paula Findlen, and others disclose their research in the artistic documentation of sexual condemnation.
 
The Mechanical Eye

The invention of photography in the 1830’s brought fantasy to a new level. The capturing of nudes was both used scientifically and erotically. Glass plate negatives allowed photographic copies to be inexpensively attained, which exposed pornographic stills to the lower class. The Mechanical Eye follows photography’s transition from a blossoming innovation to a vehicle for the production of pornographic magazines reproduced for the mass market. Anne McCauley, Uwe Scheid, Linda Williams, and other experts explore this important period of pornography’s history.
 
Twentieth Century Foxy

Pornography was revolutionized by the arrival of motion pictures. The erotic nature of adult media became accepted by the free-spirited attitude of the hippie generation. Adult stars were revered and celebrated for their work. Twentieth Century Foxy covers the radical transition of the industry in which pornography became a mainstream phenomenon. Directors and actors of these timepieces such as Georgina Spelvin and Marilyn Chambers provide a personal account of their experiences in the rise of the adult market.
 
Sex Lives and Videotape

The introduction of videotape marked the dwindling popularity of adult cinemas. Pornography had become a more personal media, one that could be viewed in the privacy of one’s home with pause, fast forward and rewind features. Sex Lives and Videotape explores the rapid changes that video brought about, pornography’s ultimate controversy for directors who opposed it for its low aesthetic value but were forced to compromise for its enormous profits. With the huge commercial success of tape, directors pushed the boundaries with “tasteless” pornography, shock value videos with spectacles of extreme fetishism. Directors such as Mark Kearns, Eddy de Roo, Ron Sullivan, and Bill Higgins share their stories of a time when pornography no longer had moral limits.
 
Pornotopia

The Internet pushed any boundaries ever set on pornography. With the marriage of digital media and adult entertainment, viewers could gain access with complete privacy, and achieve instant gratification. Pornotopia examines the enormous impact of the World Wide Web on the way in which we respond to adult media, and how it affects our personal lives. Experts including author Bernard Arcand, social critic Con Isshow, and adult star Seymore Butts, comment on the effects of the Internet pornography trend from an economic and social perspective.
 
 

Gérard Depardieu leads an all-star international cast in the epic adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic tale of love, intrigue and revenge.

The Count of Monte Cristo tells the dramatic story of Edmond Dantès, a young French sailor who is falsely denounced as a traitor and unjustly imprisoned for eighteen years without a trial. After a daring escape, Dantès uncovers a hidden treasure on the island of Monte Cristo. Using these riches, he assumes a new identity and devises a plan to seek vengeance on all who betrayed him.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Alejandro, a tough and ambitious Latino street orphan on the verge of adolescence, lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York. In this chaotic world of adults, young Alejandro struggles to make a better life for himself and his 16-year-old sister, Isamar.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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• Full Reviews - Coming Soon!
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Reviews

2009 INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD NOMINEE
BEST DIRECTOR (Ramin Bahrani)
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHER (Michael Simmonds)

“The major revelation of the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight!”
- Le Monde

“Miraculous! An American film with the raw power of Pixote or City of God. Unexpected, inspired and brave!”
- Roger Ebert

The latest thriller from French New Wave veteran Claude Chabrol opens with a tongue-in-cheek claim that it does not depict real events, even though it’s timely and provocative account of corporate and political corruption was inspired by a real-life scandal involving a French oil giant and several top-level politicians. The stunning and accomplished Isabelle Huppert (I Heart Huckabees) stars as Jeanne, a tenacious magistrate known as “the piranha” of the judiciary system, who puts her personal life on the back burner to pursue white-collar criminals with their private hands in public pockets. After gaining fame for locking up an embezzling CEO, Jeanne pushes the limits of her intoxicating power further than ever and winds up isolated in a dangerous game of threats and intimidation.

• Cast & Crew

Go behind closed doors with renowned director Raymond Depardon (winner of 3 Cesar Awards) for a rare, inside look at a Paris courtroom. The subtle details of human behavior and the issues of guilt, innocence, law enforcement and racial perceptions are highlighted in this unprecedented examination of a dozen cases before the same judge in the French legal system.

Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Law, Politics & Government
Language: French with English subtitles
Copyright: © 2004 Palmeraie & Desert / France 2 Cinema. All Rights Reserved.
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 107 minutes + 49 bonus minutes
UPC Number: 741952307297
Catalog Number: KLF-DV-3072
ISBN Number: 1-4172-0088-X
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)

• College / University: $249.00
  
  
  

• Library / High School: $129.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!
 

• Full Reviews
• Credits

In the state of Judea in southern Africa, violence, poverty and sectarianism are endemic. The neighbouring Alliance has invaded to restore ‘peace’ at gunpoint. Bloody street battles accompany the neighbouring dictatorship’s incursion into its weaker satellite. Promises of a transition to open democratic rule accompany summary executions and brutal massacres. As the civil war reaches a new level, a divine child is born to a lowly couple. As he grows and witnesses the inhumanity of the world he lives in, his angelic guardians offer him an escape to the heavens. He refuses. This is his world and he must try to save it from the work of evil men and from the darkness working through them. As an adult, he travels to the capital, gathering followers from the armed factions of rebels that crisscross the land. He demands that his followers give up their guns and confront their corrupt rulers with a vision of non-violent protest and solidarity. Inevitably, he attracts the attention of the Judean tribal leaders who have struck a power-sharing deal with the aloof Governor Pilate. The Son of Man must be brought down and destroyed. It should be another simple ‘disappearance’ like any other…

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Reviews

“More moving than the Last temptation of Christ and smarter than Mel Gibson’s Passion”
- Seattle Weekly

“It doesn’t strain to draw parallels with world events because it doesn’t have to…extraordinary and powerful.”
- Roger Ebert

“Vivid, thrilling, awe-inspiring”
- Telegraph

“Son of Man could hardly
be bettered”
- Variety

Over 40 years ago, on October 9, 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was executed by the Bolivian army, aided by the CIA. Guevara’s diary, a detailed, personal account of his futile 11-month attempt to foment revolution in Bolivia, is the basis of this moving portrait. Che’s relationship with the mysterious Tania, his betrayal by local peasants, his constant battle with asthma, and his distress at the death of his comrades is recounted. Interviews with Bolivians who met Che during these final days, coupled with narrations from Che’s actual diaries, testify to a man who embraced sacrifice for his ideals. This is an enlightening insight into the real history of a revolutionary icon.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

At the center of the Middle East conflict, hearts beat in tragic comedy and deadpan irony: a sexy young Palestinian woman defies Israeli soldiers and struts through a check-point as if it were the catwalk of a fashion show, Santa Claus is chased up the sun-drenched hills of Nazareth by a gang of knife-wielding school kids, Israeli police use a blindfolded prisoner to provide directions to tourists in Jerusalem and a female ninja descends from the sky, holding the map of ‘Palestine’ as her battle shield. These are but a few of the provocative images put forth in Elia Suleiman’s critically-acclaimed satire chronicling the absurdities of life and love on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli border.

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Reviews

“Touching, provocative and wonderfully strange!”
- A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“One of the top ten films of the year!”
-Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

“Ridiculous and smart, hilarious and terrifying”
- The Austin Chronicle

“Funny…fantastical…an irresistible work of art”
- San Francisco Chronicle

“Blissfully Surreal”
- The Washington Post

“Hysterical and devastating!”
- Lorriane Ali, Newsweek

“4 Stars!”
- Gene Seymour, Newsday

“Blissfully surreal! A one-of-a-kind experience!”
- Desson Howe, The Washington Post