Movies: Arts Council Of Great Britain

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the me...

In this film an interior landscape is scrutinised, and an apparent rational calm is revealed as suffocating. Milk and Glass is an evocative journey from surface to interior – a black-coated mirror, the hollow of a bowl, a cavernous throat; a brush de...

The Arts Council commissioned this film to coincide with their major retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in the summer of 1965. A similar exhibition was held concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ...

Follows dub poet master Linton Kwesi Johnson out of the recording studio onto the Brixton streets....

Toulouse-Lautrec's sketchbooks are turned into an animated short....

Early 90s London gets a vibrant dose of African culture in this mini odyssey fusing dance, music and fashion....

Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946....

Assesses the contribution made by British avant-garde composer, Cornelius Cardew, to contemporary music. Includes interviews with Stockhausen and other composers, and extracts from Cardew's own works....

Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, phot...

Dada came out of the craziness of World War One. "The birth of Dada was not the beginning of art but of disgust." Surrealism tried to systematize Dada's anarchy into an artistic blend of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist provocation. In the interes...

About Performance Art and its historical origins including its links with folk customs. The film includes extracts from the work of many different performance artists from England and abroad collected from 1979 to 1983, amongst them: Tibor Hajas (Hun...

Bruce Lacey: 'People used to come and make documentaries about me, but they weren't interested in the day-to-day family life that I found extremely interesting and funny. So I decided to make that film myself. All the members of the family wrote down...

From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the bygone days of manual glassmaking and an observation of the impact of the mass-produced glass on the ch...

A portrait of Salford-born poet, storyteller and comic, John Cooper-Clarke. His poems, a satirical blend of humour and social comment, are delivered at a fast pace, often with musical backing. His style, and that of his contemporary Linton Kwesi John...

Cezanne's Eye is an experiential journey through the body of a unique landscape - that of Cezanne's Provence. Using intuitive and expressionist visual language and a striking specially composed soundtrack (by Stuart Jones) the film is a movement thro...

A bewitching celebration of menstruation which uses a variety of animation techniques from pixilation to scratch on film. An antidote to the vacuous sanitised view of menstruation promoted by advertising. A dream life of angels. What wings really mea...

An engaging and enlightening documentary about Jeff Keen shown on Channel 4 in 1983. Features Keen performing in front of his film projections as well as talking about and showing his work in different media....

A home movie on permanent loop. Live action up for grabs. A family walk the walk across a field, disappearing into memory as they do. Who knows where the families go? In the countryside on a sunny day a family group repeatedly walk towards the camer...

A young woman in New York....

Documentary on advertising. Investigates the way work has disappeared from advertising images, and traces the phenomenon through archive advertising films from 1897 to 1960. Places advertising in the context of historical events and everyday life, ar...