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Death and the devil, nudity and eroticism, horror in blazing colours, Gothic art cast a spell over people 500 years ago. In these image-poor times, art deliberately and skilfully played with the emotions of the viewer, triggering fear, devotion, but also rapture. Art documentary on German gothic art of the late-middle ages.
National Vampire is a feature-length documentary that explores vampire culture in the United States. To achieve this, the filmmakers spent more than two years traveling around the country, attending vampire-related events, and interviewing dozens of people involved in the vampire community. Shooting locations include a Vampire’s Ball held in New Orleans each Halloween, a vampire tour of San Francisco, and a New York City shop that “transforms” people into vampires. Also featured are a vampire “dentist” who makes fangs for a living, vampire role playing gamers in Dayton, Ohio, a vampire-themed magician, and a bloodthirsty Texas couple that claims to be the real thing. Going beyond the surface, National Vampire also explores a number of subcultures that overlap the vampire community, including the goth music scene, bondage and S&M, and blood fetishists who take part in piercing and full-body suspension rituals.
Author David Macaulay hosts CATHEDRAL, based on his award-winning book. Using a combination of spectacular location sequences and cinema-quality animation, the program surveys France's most famous churches. Travel back to 1214 to explore the design of Notre Dame de Beaulieu, a representative Gothic cathedral. The program tells period tales revealing fascinating stories of life and death, faith and despair, prosperity, and intrigue.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
An analysis of the gothic movement, which emerged in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom, through its history, codes, favorite themes, and sources of inspiration, the clichés it is subject to, and the different tribes that comprise it. Alternating commentary on factual images of the scene (concerts, nightclubs, specialty shops, etc.) with interviews with goths, including Olivier, leader of the band ROSA CRUX, Patrick Eudeline, rock journalist, François Darmigny, fashion photographer, and the president of Miviludes, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combating Sectarian Aberrations.
Born from the ashes of punk, the goth tribe has been evolving rapidly for 30 years. This subculture, initially niche, has grown into a social phenomenon that is flourishing around the world. In Europe, the community includes tens of thousands of people. Marilyn Manson fills concert halls, Jean-Paul Gaultier draws inspiration from gothic aesthetics for his collections, Tim Burton incorporates the movement's codes into his films... Yet the goth community remains relatively unknown. Media coverage of the phenomenon has often been content to perpetuate clichés, without revealing its richness. For over a year, the directors of this documentary traveled to Paris, Strasbourg, and across the Rhine to meet with goths. Over the past decade, Germany has become the center of gravity for this movement.
