Tonight's film examines the life and work of New York-based photographer Nan Goldin. This documentary contains some bad language, and sequences which have a sexual content and reflect the gay scene and drug culture of seventies New York.
The series of provocative films about contemporary art and culture continues with a rare insight into the life of charismatic American RickyJay, arguably the greatest prestidigitator alive.
Last year's World Cup final between Brazil and Italy was watched by one of the largest audiences in television history. The final kick was by Italy's Roberto Baggio , taking the last penalty in a sudden-death shoot-out. Thisfilm presents a portrait of the emotions wrought by the match in viewers around the world, from Lapland to Cameroon.
In tonight's programme, director Marc Karlin traces his own changing attitude to the work of American abstract artist Cy Twombly. When Karlin first encountered Twombly's paintings, his reaction was one of anger and incomprehension. The Outrage is a poetic and reflective essay which charts the film-maker's increasing fascination with Twombly's work and his attempts to understand his own reactions to it. The film uses the device of a fictional character, called "M", who disappears after having looked at a Cy Twombly painting. "M" subsequently embarks on a personal journey through the world of art. He seeks the opinions of critics, artists and gallery curators in order to explore different ways of looking at art, from Giotto to the present day.
The story of a group of classical music students of the Beijing Central Conservatory who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. From being dedicated students of Bach and Beethoven, they became Red Guards devoted to class struggle, then suffered years of exile and hard labour before ending up, against all the odds, as players in some of China's leading orchestras. The film is presented by Anxi Jiang - a piano student at the Conservatory - and centres on her experiences and those of her mother and several of her classmates. Tonight's programme was filmed entirely in China and includes a wealth of Chinese peasant music, revolutionary songs, western classical compositions and music from the Beijing Opera.
This documentary - mixing dramatic reconstruction, archive footage and first-hand testimony - analyses racism in the colonial and post-colonial worlds through the life of Frantz Fanon , one of the century's major black intellectuals. Fanon was a French citizen who enlisted in the fight against the Nazis. But his roots - the Caribbean island of Martinique - meant he was a figure feared and suspected in post-war France. His worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria, but resigned in 1956 after becoming an outspoken critic of French policy there. He was expelled and died before Algeria secured independence, but his legacy lives on in the books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Colin Salmon plays Fanon in flashback while Fanon's son, Oliver, is amongthe interviewees casting light upon a man Jean-Paul Sartre regarded as a spokesman forthe developing world.
Tonight's film is a special performance by actress Fiona Shaw of T S Eliot's poem The Waste Land. First published in 1922, the poem remains a startlingly modern work, and this programme presents an opportunity to reassess its relevance today.
Last in the series of original and provocative films about contemporary art and culture.Pandaemonium is a spectacular film about artists and performers who are exploring the boundary between the human body and machines. Those featured include artists who work with machines such as huge robots and devices designed to push the body to the limits of endurance. See today's choices. Directors Richard Curson Smith , Lesley Asako Gladsjo; Series editor John Wyver
The men who as boys in the sixties acted in Lord of the Flies are reunited with director Peter Brook on the Caribbean island where the film was set.
Sarah Lucas is one of a generation of young British artists currently feted by the art world. This intimate portrait examines both the artist and her work, which is concerned with questions of identity and sexuality and is often shamelessly vulgar. Her best-known creation is composed of two fried eggs and a doner kebab on a table, while another entitled Bitch uses two melons and a dried fish. Friends and colleagues who appear include artists Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume and Damien Hirst.
Tonight's documentary in the provocative arts strand follows comedian Eddie Izzard on his recent world tour, starting in his teenage home town of Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex and ending in New York.
The photographer Guy Bourdin pushed seventies fashion images to the limit, capturing the vivid, glossy and sexy looks of the time. He worked almost exclusively for French Vogue, where his dazzling colour images were a foil to Helmut Newton 's black-and-white erotica. But while Bourdin remains a cult hero in the fashion world, his name is little known elsewhere. This documentary examines his photographs and explores the darker side of his work. Featuring interviews with colleagues, including photographers Helmut Newton and Jean Baptiste Mondino, and model Jerry Hall.
Subtitled Self-portrait in December, JLG/JLG is a complex and personal film by the director Jean-Luc Godard. With Francois Truffaut, Godard was one of the guiding forces in the late fifties and sixties of the French New Wave, a cinema movement that has influenced many film-makers. His features include A Bout de Souffle (1959), Alphaville (1965) and Weekend (1967). In recent years he has worked in Switzerland on analytical films that contemplate the film-making process. Tonight's edition of TX features the director in his editing room. By freely juxtaposing passages of classical music, movie quotes and shots of Lake Geneva, Godard improvises a story which intertwines his own experiences and his thoughts on 20th-century film history. In French with English subtitles.
Throughout his life, Orson Welles worked on numerous projects which, mostly because of his travels and lack of money, were never completed. This documentary, made with the collaboration of companion Oja Kodar , offers a new understanding of Welles's creative achievement.
A revealing look at the life of fictional dancer, portrayed by acclaimed choreographer and performer Wendy Houstoun, best known for her work with dance group DV8. The film directed by David Hinton and shot on a camcorder in the streets, houses and studios of London in the summer of 1996, is an attempt to understand the dancer through her own observations and experiences.
The series exploring popular culture returns with three films this week, starting with a look at Dutch artist Rob Scholte. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful in the eighties, Scholte had his world shattered by a car bomb attack in 1994 in which he lost both his legs. The perpetrator's identity remains a mystery. This film tells the artist's remarkable story.
A sci-fi dance narrative, set in the year 7079. A researcher is sent out to investigate the results of an old experiment on weeds. Producers Peter Missotten and AnnQuirynen
Sharon Chazan was on the brink of a successful career as a photographer when she was murdered by one of the men she depicted. This film showcases Sharon's work for the first time. and asks whether it was her closeness to her subjects which ultimately led to her death.
Few film-makers have generated as much speculation, myth and gossip as Donald Cammell, who made his name with the cult 1969 film Performance. Yet Cammell's career failed to take off and he directed only three more films, including White of the Eye, before taking his own life in April in a way reminiscent of a murder at the end of Performance. This film about Cammell's life and work includes contributions from his family and Performance stars Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg , as well as interviews with Cammell filmed shortly before his death.
The series about contemporary culture returns for a three-week run, beginning with five short films responding to the approaching millennium. Breda Beban 's May 98 portrays an accident-prone woman while Dead TV by Chris Petit re-evaluates television history. Artist Heathcote Williams stars in Marc Karlin 's poignant modern fable The Haircut, and John Akomfrah 's spectral The Call of Mist examines death and cloning, while actress Tilda Swinton makes her directorial debut with Shall We Wake?
Artist Richard Billingham 's first TV film charts the pathos, despair and hope of family life within a Midlands high-rise flat. Ray stands in the kitchen feeding fish; Liz plays computer games; Jason swats a fly-all the time filmed by Richard. Editor John Wyver
In 1995, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art commissioned artist Mel Chin to find a new arena for modem work. Seeing television as the most public space there is in late 20th-century life, Chin, together with a group of artists called the Gala Committee, began incorporating new pieces of art into the set of leading American soap opera Melrose Place. Chin and the members of Gala describe the aims of the project and reveal how their art has appeared in the soap. Plus actors and members of the production team discussing the impact the work of the artists has had on the programme
Regarded as one of America's finest, if unsung, film critics, Manny Farber has won acclaim for his unusual approach to movie analysis, which dispenses with general plot description in favour of considering the concepts of light, tempo and, above all, space. This film uses and expands on Farber's work to explore the USA's vast expanses and also how people regard and recall films. Contains strong material. Director Chris Petit : Producer Keith Griffiths
John Maybury 's film is a complex visual meditation on the idea of memory at the end of the 20th century. Using state-of-the-art video effects, the work takes as its starting point an imaginary debate between Antonin Artaud and Edie Sedgwick chaired by visionary designer and eighties counter-cultural icon Leigh Bowery. With this work, Maybury, who wrote and directed the Francis Bacon biography Love Is the Devil, has taken a deliberately antithetical position to the film theory of Dogma popularised by recent art-house releases such as Festen and The Idiots. Starring Daniel Craig and Heile Makatsch , with the voice of Sir Derek Jacobi plus a soundtrack by Daniel Goddard. Contains strobing effects in parts. Producer Keith Griffiths
An exploration of the life and work of Joshua Compston , who died in 1996, at the age of 25. from an overdose of ether. Friends, family and fellow artists recall his work, ideas and passions. Contains strong language and sexual imagery. Director Liz Friend
Shot in Manhattan over a period of five years, this acclaimed film is a personal portrait of New York City by director Jem Cohen, who is best known for his videos for American rock band REM. Part documentary, part detective story and part poetic musing on the strangeness of modern life, it is loosely woven around the strange tale of a pushcart vendor who discovers a notebook filled with jottings and enigmatic messages, which in turn leads him on a trail around the city.
Jane Dudley , choreographer, performer and one of the key players in the founding of the London School of Contemporary Dance, is 87 and arthritic. This celebration of her art and beliefs, which includes use of the latest computer animation techniques, combines Dudley's candid career recollections with performance footage in an artistic expression of her struggle with daily life and her preparations for death. Director Gillian Lacey
A film by photographer and video artist Nick Wapplington made during a six-month trip taking in the USA, Cuba, Japan, Brazil and Easter Island. Images that include the collapse of a glacier cliff, a cockroach under ant attack, and a Californian desert artificially lit at night are underscored by an original soundtrack from dance band Orbital.
Choreographer and dancer Michael Clark , one of the most important contemporary artists to emerge in Britain since the early eighties, disappeared from the stage in 1994. This film follows the creation, touring and performance of Clark's most recent work CURRENT/See, which marked his return to the stage after a four-year absence.