Albert Maysles and his brother David (who died in 1987), who are best known for such films as Salesman, Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, began filming THE GATES in 1979, when internationally acclaimed artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude began actively pushing their installation project forward with the New York City government. The Maysles captured the emerging controversy at community board hearings that pitted neighbor against neighbor over the appropriate use of Central Park. While Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic vision sought to unite all of New York City, the public reaction was accusations of publicly financed defacement of a masterpiece, akin to putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa at tax payers’ expense. The proposal was denied. Twenty-four years later, after 9/11 and the election of art patron Michael Bloomberg as mayor, the project was approved in January, 2003. The subsequent film, brought to fruition by Antonio Ferrera and co-directed with Albert Maysles, chronicles the evolution of The Gates from concept to installation, ultimately overcoming public disapproval and transforming Central Park into a visual symphony of color, light, joy and beauty at an eventual cost to Christo and Jeanne-Claude of $21 million. The event, which brought over 4 million visitors from around the world to Central Park in mid-winter, is lovingly captured in this masterful film which ultimately asks the question: What is the role of art today?
Alive Mind Education is very proud to announce that The Gates
was listed as one of Video Librarian’s Best Documentaries of 2009!
Alive Mind Education remembers the life of Jeanne-Claude, who passed away on November 18, 2009.
THE GATES Product Information
Year: 2008 Grade Level: Grades 10-12, college and university Subjects:Arts, Architectural Studies Set: DVD Only Total Running Time: 98 minutes ISBN-10: 0-9820814-6-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-9820814-6-4 Educational Prices:
Educational with Public Performance Rights: $249.00
Educational without Public Performance Rights: $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!
“I can’t imagine a better choice for the closing-night film of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival…
a stunning, beautiful, deeply moving documentary about the art project by installation artists
Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”
- MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher, May 2007
“Ferrara and Maysles orchestrate the construction, installation and deployment of the gates as a
three-part symphony, ending with a two-week improvisational interlude, as hundreds of thousands
of New Yorkers flock to the park in February. As the mega-artwork is transformed by snow, sunsets
and streams of people, the brightly colored 23 miles of pathways transform the wintry landscape
into a fantastical garden of dancing cloth.”
- Ronnie Scheib, Daily Variety, May 2007
Brilliantly acted and sung by the internationally acclaimed South African theater company Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK), U-Carmen is a stunning adaptation of perhaps the world’s best-loved opera, Carmen. Re-imagined in the modern world of South African pool halls, bars, courtyards and barracks U-Carmen tells the story of a cigarette factory-worker, Carmen (Pauline Malefane), and her doomed love affair with a police sergeant. As the two grow more emotionally connected, their relationship escalates violently, culminating in a tragic conclusion of revenge and madness.
Women and Spirituality is the definitive series that explores the power of the sacred feminine in mythological, historical and cultural contexts. This trilogy investigates the relationship between women and spirituality from ancient times to the present. Goddess Remembered is a salute to 35 000 years of “pre-history,” to the values of ancestors only recently remembered, and to the goddess-worshipping religions of the ancient past. Burning Times is an in-depth look at the witch-hunts that swept through Europe just a few hundred years ago. In Full Circle authors, teachers, social activists and feminists explore manifestations of contemporary women’s spirituality in the Western world.
Women & Spirituality: The Goddess Trilogy Product Information
“…massive and beautiful film…” - Los Angeles Times
“…sets the record straight…” - The San Francisco Chronicle
Women & Spirituality: The Goddess Trilogy
Part 1
Goddess Remembered
This poetic documentary is a salute to 35 000 years of “pre-history,” to the values of ancestors only recently remembered, and to the goddess-worshipping religions of the ancient past. Goddess Remembered features Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, Luisah Teish, Starhawk, Charlene Spretnak, and Jean Bolen, who link the loss of goddess-centred societies with today’s environmental crisis. They propose a return to the belief in an interconnected life system, with respect for the earth and the female, as fundamental to our survival.
Part 2
The Burning Times
This beautifully crafted film is an in-depth look at the witch-hunts that swept through Europe just a few hundred years ago. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake, and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The Burning Times advances the theory that widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times.
Part 3
Full Circle
In this stirring documentary, authors, teachers, social activists and feminists explore manifestations of contemporary women’s spirituality in the Western world. Drawing on the customs, rites and knowledge of the past, Full Circle envisions a sustainable future where domination is replaced with respect. At the centre of these discussions is a reverence for the Earth–a sacred circle which we must protect.
Featured Experts
Donna Read is an award-winning producer, director and editor. Her credits include a television special called Temagami; a documentary on the life’s work of Marija Gimbutas, Signs out of Times; she won the best edited award at the Toronto International film festival in 1982 for Behind The Veil: Nuns. She received 8 awards for her three- part series Women and Spirituality. She was editor, associate director, and producer for Anatomy of Desire, which received a Juno award for best editing. Mask and Drum won first prize at the London International Film Festival. In 2003 she and fellow W&S expert Starhawk formed Belili Productions
Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern earth-based spirituality. She is also well-known as a global justice activist and organizer, whose work and writings have inspired many to action. Starhawk is best known as an articulate pioneer in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess
religion. She is a cofounder of Reclaiming, an activist branch of modern Pagan religion, and continues to work closely with the Reclaiming community. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, and is deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism
Charlene Spretnak is one of the many originators of the women’s spirituality movement. She is a cofounder of the Green Party movement in the United States. In 1989 Charlene Spretnak was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in recognition of her writings on spirituality and social justice. In 2006 she was named by the Environment Department of the British government to their list of “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time” in recognition of her pioneering work in ecological thought, spirituality, and activism. She is a professor in the philosophy and religion program (in the Women’s Spirituality concentration) at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a graduate institute in San Francisco.
Carol Christ is a feminist, eco-feminist and a pioneer in the Goddess movement. Her essay “Why Women Need the Goddess” delivered at the Great Goddess Re-emerging Conference in 1978 has been reprinted scores of times. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale in Religious Studies. She has taught at Harvard Divinity School, Pomona College, Columbia University, San Jose State, and California Institute of Integral Studies where she currently is Adjunct Professor offering courses over the internet in the Women’s Spirituality Program. In 1987 she resigned a tenured position and moved to Greece where she became a citizen in 2002. She is trying to save the wetlands of her beloved island working with Friends of Green Lesbos and World Wildlife Fund–Greece.
MerlinStone became interested, in adulthood, in archaeology and ancient religions from her study of ancient art. She taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She spent a decade on research before writing the book published in the UK as The Paradise Papers and then in the U.S. as When God Was a Woman (1976). It describes her theory of how the Hebrews suppressed allegedly goddess-based religions practiced in Canaan and how their reaction to what she asserts as being the existing matriarchal and matrilineal societal structures shaped Judaism and, thus, Christianity. Another major work, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood collects stories, myths, and prayers involving goddess-figures from a wide variety of world religions, ancient civilizations.
Luisah Teish is an author, storyteller, and priestess of the Ifa/Orisha faith from New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the founder and president of Ile Orunmila Oshun, and holds a chieftancy title in the Fatunmise lineage as head Oshun Priest in the United States. She is the Vice President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and the founder of the School of Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts Center in Oakland, CA. She is the author of several books on African religion. She has been on the faculty at University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California, the Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California, and she teaches at New College of California, John F. Kennedy University, the Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Center, and Naropa. Her performances, lectures and workshops have taken her to Europe, Egypt, South America, New Zealand, Nigeria, Costa Rica, and across the United States.
Jean Bolen is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of the Institute for Health and Healing’s “Pioneers in Art, Science, and the Soul of Healing Award”. She brings an emphasis on the question for meaning and the need for a spiritual dimension in life to all aspects of her work, while also taking into account the powerful effects of archetypes within us and family and culture upon us. Her books are used as college and university texts in gender studies, women’s psychology, mythology, spirituality, east-west philosophy, and psychology courses.
After the fall of Communism, the plight of the Proletariat is rarely discussed. WORKINGMAN’S DEATH is an unflinching portrait of the state of manual labor in the 21st century. This award-winning documentary reveals the invisible face of workers from around the world. In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines in order to scrape together enough coal to buy vodka. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down while Western tourists snap pictures of the stunning landscape. Knee-deep blood, scorching fire and acrid smoke are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pashtun immigrants in Pakistan use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal and live in shanty towns constructed from the scrap. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed as capitalism erodes the foundation of communist ideology in the world’s fastest growing nation.
Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. WORKINGMAN’S DEATH provides a rare glimpse into the harsh treatment faced by manual labor around the world.
The sardonic epigraph for “Workingman’s Death,” the Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s glamorized documentary examination of hard physical labor, comes from Faulkner: work is “the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.”
Maybe so. But as Chekhov observed, “Man must toil, he must work in the sweat of his brow, whoever he is, and in this alone is encompassed the sense and the aim of his life, his happiness, his raptures.”
The film seems to want to dispute Faulkner. As it observes laborers from around the world going to hell and back, day after day, year after year, to eke out subsistence livings, you are struck by their exuberance, vitality, teamwork and satisfaction in discharging backbreaking duties with a minimum of complaint. The simple act of doing the work, no matter how dangerous, gives their lives structure and purpose; triumphing over fear adds to their sense of accomplishment.
When you’re totally immersed in the physical moment, there is no room left for ennui. At least that’s the romantic way “Workingman’s Death” likes to imagine hard labor. But tell that to all the oppressed union workers over the decades who have gone on strike for better wages and working conditions.
A film of few words but plenty of indelible images of people (mostly men) risking their lives with hardly a second thought, “Workingman’s Death” hopscotches to various work sites around the world. It is divided into chapters with portentous titles like Heroes, Ghosts, Lions and Brothers that evoke the Herculean labors of Alexsei Stakhanov, a legendary coal miner in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930’s who was mythicized for his superhuman productivity and is remembered at the beginning of the film.
Jumping to the present, “Workingman’s Death” visits Stakhanov’s latter-day descendants extracting what coal remains in the Donbass region of Ukraine, where he toiled 70 years earlier.
Squeezing their bodies into narrow crevices known as mousetraps, many no higher than 16 inches, the miners use chisels and pickaxes to dig coal out of these depleted mines.
After separating coal from rock, they haul their meager spoils out of the pit by hand in small wagons, and divide it up. Most use it to heat their homes. The little bit left over is sold for food. Without the coal, one declares, they would freeze to death.
The film’s next stop is a mine at the edge of a volcanic crater in Kawah Ijen, Indonesia, where the earth spits out molten sulfur in hissing yellow fumes that quickly harden into slabs.
Men toting bamboo baskets balanced on their shoulders descend a perilous mountain path into the infernal mist and return bearing 200-pound loads for the three-mile trek back up the mountainside.
The most disturbing stop on the tour is an outdoor slaughterhouse in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where goats are killed, skinned, cut into portions, cleaned and roasted.
The camera’s unblinking views of the bleating animals’ throats being slit, sending geysers of blood gushing onto the street, suggest a dispassionate nature documentary in which humans are the alpha species in the natural pecking order.
Next up are the Pakistani workers in the port of Gaddani who have traveled hundreds of miles from their mountain villages to dismember giant ships, using blowtorches to split them apart and sending great hunks of metal crashing into the water. The pieces are cut up and sold as scrap.
Although the work is extremely dangerous, they toil in an atmosphere of calm. What little leisure they have is devoted to saying Islamic prayers and eating food they cook for themselves.
“Workingman’s Death” doesn’t go into detail in any of these scenes. It lets the images (underscored by John Zorn’s industrial music) speak for themselves.
The movie has the structure and tone of an epic historical poem that begins in the past, moves into the present and in two final sequences speculates on the future.
The first, set in a Chinese steelworks in Angang, parallels the optimistic communal spirit there with the exalting of collective labor in the days of Stakhanov.
The second, in Duisburg, Germany, visits a shuttered steelworks that produced more than 30 million of tons of steel from 1903 to 1985. With the blast furnaces turned into an outdoor light show, it is now literally a museum piece.
In the film’s production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, “Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?” In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.
Written and directed by Michael Glawogger; in Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, English, Ibu, Yoruba, Pashtu and Mandarin, with English subtitles; director of photography, Wolfgang Thaler; edited by Mona Willi and Ilse Buchelt; music by John Zorn; released by Lorber HT Digital. Running time: 122 minutes. This film is not rated.
Workingman’s Death is a long but engrossing film that presents some of the most horrible working conditions of the forgotten laborer in this century. Accustomed to American labor practices where working conditions are often guided by government regulations or union agreements most of us will be shocked at the plight of the workingman in the far corners of the world.
The film first takes us to the Ukraine where we view people struggling to mine coal in abandoned mines in order to make a living. The dangerous conditions in the mines, the possibility of a cave-in are accepted risks that the laborers take. What is truly amazing is the pride they exhibit in what they are able to accomplish. In Indonesia we see strong young backs carrying loads of sulfur down the mountain, some of these weighing as much as 70 kg. The air is putrefied and the trails are rugged but the money is good while you can do it. Sulfur is a mainstay of the Indonesian economy. The open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria is difficult to view if you have a weak constitution. All the blood and gore is there but the workers move among the blood and guts making bargains for their prize goats or cattle. In Pakistan we watch as local workers strip a large tanker for as much scrap metal as they can salvage. Without proper tools and without appropriate protection the workers put themselves in jeopardy to skim as much as possible to gain the rewards. In China we see steelworkers working hard as they also strive to stay ahead of the technologies that affect their status. The day of the worker hero is over.
What is most compelling throughout these glimpses is the common theme of survival. People work knowingly under dangerous and gruesome conditions but are able to see value in their job and are thankful for the opportunity. They have a sense of pride in their labor. They survive and have hope for the future even though they know they can’t do this forever. The entire film is subtitled but easy to read.
Recommended for upper level college students or graduate students who are studying human behavior or for an ethics course for business students to get a grasp on international labor conditions. The film is entirely sub-titled and some sections are not easy to view but the message is compelling.
"The film juxtaposes footage ....with discussions of “soul force,” defined as the spiritually-motivated, nonviolent forms of resistance associated with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. A solid discussion starter, Fierce Light is recommended."
-Video Librarian September/October 2009
"...The Gates makes clear that a lot of folk found Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park enterprise both beautiful and moving. Recommended.
-Video Librarian September/October 2009
"Narcissistic or not, the breakthroughs experienced by some of the participants seem real enough, although Morgan neglects to disclose how much individuals paid for the privilege. The Workshop is recommended for academic human sexuality studies."
-Video Librarian September/October 2009
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Educational with Public Performance Rights: $249.00 
