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Editor's Note:
To order any of these videos, contact us by email at info@lavavideo.org, by phone 212-243-48048, or by fax 212-243-2007. Our website, www.latinamericanvideo.org, allows for secure purchases by credit card.
Motivations Get Details and Purchasing Info
Marisol Trujillo
Documentary 14 minutes 1988
With English subtitles
This film features the renowned Cuban artist Manuel Mendive speaking about his enigmatic artwork. The combination of esoteric African and Afrocuban myth, surrealism, and deliberate ingenuousness in his paintings and sculptures gives them a very mysterious character. Motivations serves to shed light on the creative process and environment that go into the creation of Mendive’s work. Although he claims that he can express more through his art than his words, Mendive’s ruminations on his background in the Afrocuban santería religion and the centrality of Africa in his work are revealing. In the film, Mendive describes how a recent trip to Angola altered his thinking about landscape and color, inspiring him towards his trademark utilization of painted bodies and cloth in outdoor performances. Motivations does not aim to explain to the viewer an overarching meaning for Mendive’s work, but contextualizes a multiplicity of ways to view Mendive’s bewitching and multifaceted art.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
It Seems Like Happiness Get Details and Purchasing Info
Aaron Vega
Documentary 20 minutes 1997
With English subtitles
This documentary portrays a large public performance of “It Seems Like Happiness,” a work by the legendary Afrocuban artist Manuel Mendive, in all its exuberance, sensuality, comic absurdity, and philosophical weight. In the Carnival atmosphere Mendive creates in the streets of Havana, brightly colored bodies serve as living, dancing canvases for the artist’s trademark anthropomorphic animals, abstract shapes, and vivid hues. Impressive for its scale, the energy of the performers, and its egalitarian proximity to the public, this was Mendive’s most ambitious work to date, reconfiguring symbols from Afrocuban religion, elements from nature, avant-garde texts, and the unembarrassed beauty of the human body. The video not only documents the vibrancy of the work, and its enthusiastic (if quizzical) reception by the public, but the spirit of camaraderie between the artist and the various performers in the long hours of preparation for the performance – a valuable record of Mendive’s idiosyncratic genius.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Cuban Artists Series Get Details and Purchasing Info
Roberto Chile
Documentary 22 minutes 1998
No English subtitles
This video is a series of montages of visuals from the work of various Cuban artists, mostly painters but also some printmakers and sculptors, set to music to create individual portraits of these artists' work. The artists included are Choco, Sosabravo, Ileana Mulet Ardor, Ernesto Garcia Pena, Roberto Fabelo, Nelson Dominguez, Aida del Rio, Rubin Alpizar, Bejarrano, Arnaldo Larrinagas, Elsa Mora, Julio Girona, Juan Quintanilla, and Eduardo Abela. No dialogue.
Purchase Price: $ 49.95
Bispo Do Osario, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
H. Marinho da Rocha and M.Przewodowski
docudrama 46 minutes 1993
With English subtitles
The life of artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario who for 50 years lived in the desperate psychiatric asylum the "Colonia Juliano Moreira" (in Rio de Janeiro). Until his death in 1989, his art was almost completely unknown as Bispo refused to be separated from the works he produced. He had never intended to be an artist but only followed the voice of God who told him that he should reconstruct the world and present it to Him at his death. Taking as its viewpoint Bispo's imagination, the film tells the story of this artist, his art and relationship with the probationary psychologist, Rosangela Maria.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Under the Skin Get Details and Purchasing Info
Niurka Perez
Documentary 25 minutes 1995
With English subtitles
An intimate portrait of Ecuadoran artist Oswaldo Guayasamin in which he discusses his life, work, and philosophy.
Purchase Price: $ 79.95
Regarding Bunuel Get Details and Purchasing Info
Jose Luis Lopez-Linares, Javier Riojo
Documentary 105 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
A thorough, entertaining documentary on the life and work of Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who filmed some of his most important works while living in Mexico. Using archival photographs, footage, and clips from his films, the video paints a complex portrait of one of the century's most revered filmmakers. Includes footage from an interview with Bunuel before his death, as well as interviews with various family members, friends, and actors. Author Carlos Monsivais and filmmaker Arturo Ripstein also weigh in.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Within Sight: The Cinema of Lombardi Get Details and Purchasing Info
Jose Luis Ridoutt Polar
Documentary 60 minutes 2003
With English subtitles
Within Sight is a documentary highlighting the cinematic career of Peru’s finest director, Francisco Lombardi. Lombardi’s films represent a variety of genres, ranging from black comedies to thrillers and psychological dramas, but viewing them holistically through the trajectory of Lombardi’s career allows those familiar with Lombardi’s oeuvre and those approaching it for the first time to see both the common themes and constant innovations that have characterized the creative work of this seminal Latin American filmmaker. Within Sight begins with the narrative of how Lombardi, a movie-obsessed young man from the provinces, erupted onto the stagnant Peruvian film scene of the late 1970s with the films Dead at Sunrise (1977) and Immoral Tales (The Friends) (1978) which represented a typically Peruvian reality that had never before been depicted on the screen, using Lima’s most unglamorous architecture for his locations, quintessentially Peruvian dialogue in his scripts, and characters drawn from the social reality of Lima’s various social classes. Lombardi’s work always retained this keen eye for specifically Peruvian social realities, but the films that followed would also engage idiosyncratic and psychologically complex characters, whether grappling with violence and madness (Death of a Magnate [1980]), sexuality (Maruja in Hell [1983]), or confrontations between warring ideologies and values (The City and the Dogs [1985]). The Lion’s Den (1988), dealing with the crossfire between the Peruvian army and Marxist guerillas, was both brilliant and highly controversial, initiating a trend in Lombardi’s work of the turbulent 1990s to comment on Peru’s conditions of political violence and social instability, as in Fallen From Heaven (1990). Although ostensibly apolitical, Under the Skin (1996) and No Mercy (1993) - a Peruvian setting of the Dostoevsky classic Crime and Punishment – deal with themes of judgment and impunity that reflect the discovery of human rights atrocities and its aftermath in Peru. Lombardi’s subsequent films continue No Mercy’s exploration of the particular psychological dilemmas of the young, as in Don’t Tell Anyone (1998) and Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1999), which explore sexuality, and Red Ink (2000), about coming into one’s own professionally. The revelation of the fall of the Fujimori dictatorship provided a backdrop for the simultaneous stories of Out of Sight (2003), Lombardi’s most recent film, from which this documentary takes its title. Within Sight relies on commentary by the filmmaker himself to provide an intimate understanding of his themes and style, juxtaposing interviews with actors, critics, and writers who have worked with Lombardi with evocative scenes taken from the films themselves. While these excerpts from Lombardi’s work in many ways speak for themselves, their inclusion in this documentary provides an unprecedented look at work as an organic whole, revealing the long-term trends of this influential artist’s most important work.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
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