A visually hypnotizing cinematic feat, Russian Ark is Alexander Sokurov's spellbinding ode to St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, and is conceived as a kind of biblical ark for 300 years of modern Russian history. The Museum is conceived to be a time-machine, and Russian Ark doesn't act so much as it muses: on art, on history, on Russia versus the West, on politics, set in one of the world's greatest repositories of European art and civilization.

Antonio Negri is a renowned Italian Marxist political philosopher. For Negri, and author of the international bestseller "Empire" (co-authored with Michael Hardt, 2000), a 17 year long chapter of repressive Italian politics of detention, exile, and imprisonment recently ended in 2003. The question for Negri is how one can preserve the freedom of spirit within a penal structure that focuses more on the interior than exterior life of the prisoner. For Antonio Negri, the cell of resistance from which he wrote became an enclosure of peace.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation’s foremost proponents of experimental cinema. This second collection continues its tribute to the Rohauer Collection, including the early works of Stan Brakhage and influential films by Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Mitry, Sidney Peterson and others. The piece de resistance is Jean isidore Isou’s passionate manifesto of film aesthetics Traite de Bave et D’eternite (Venom and Eternity), which sparked a riot when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the foremost proponents of experimental cinema. Programming diverse films at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, and making the films in his personal archive available for commercial distribution, he helped preserve and promote avant-garde cinema. This collection assembles some of the most influential and eclectic short films in the Rohauer Collection, including works by Man Ray, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Watson & Webber, Fernand Leger, Joris Ivens, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Epstein, and Orson Welles.

Hindered by the pejorative term ‘primitive cinema’, films from the first projections of moving pictures to the advent of the feature is still under-seen, under-appreciated and under-studied. Most of the popular writings about the history of film rush through the period, nodding brusquely at Thomas Edison and Edwin Porter, oversimplifying the roles of Lumieres and Melies. Then there is a great leap to Griffith, skipping entirely the contributions of essential traditions, artists and companies.

Is the home affected by outside influences? Can exterior events be separated from the interior of the home? How does this relation of the outside to the inside make a comment on the modernity of India?

The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the subsequent partition of Pakistan into Bangladesh and Pakistan in 1971, carries a history fraught with religious tension between the Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities. These are relegated to the peripheries of national and religious politics, especially in texts viewed by the western eye. But the stories of South Asia, religious or cultural, are incomplete without the particular refraction that ethnicity provides for them.

The author of works on subjects as wide-ranging as Alfred Hitchcock, 9/11, opera, Christianity, Lenin and David Lynch, Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek is one of the most important and outrageous philosophers working today. This captivating, erudite documentary explores the eccentric personality and esoteric work of this incomparable academic and writer who has been called everything from “the Elvis of cultural theory” to “a one person culture mulcher”.

The words "health care" and "comedy" aren't usually found in the same sentence, but in Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore's new movie SiCKO, they go together hand in (rubber) glove. SiCKO' is a straight-from-the-heart portrait of the crazy and sometimes cruel U.S. health care system, told from the vantage of everyday people faced with extraordinary and bizarre challenges in their quest for basic health coverage.

Maya Deren was a brilliant filmmaker and theorist whose films and writings have nevertheless paled beside the even larger legend surrounding her life and death. From the early 1940's until her sudden (and some would say supernaturally-caused) death in 1961, Maya Deren both evoked and exemplified the American avant-garde film movement virtually by herself - as filmmaker, distributor, lecturer, theorist and promoter — all in one fiery personality. She worked completely outside the commercial film industry and made her own inner experience the center of her films.

Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn’t just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera’s “kino-glaz” (cinema eye). Vertov’s rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing. Vertov was a working-class artist who desired to link workers with machines.

A group of legendary Cuban musicians, some as old as their nineties, were brought together by guitarist, Ry Cooder to record an album. Ry Cooder caused an international sensation when he introduced the world to Cuba's foremost folk musicians with his 1997 album, Buena Vista Social Club. The album, which met with extraordinary critical and popular success, went on to win a Grammy Award.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan is a documentary film by Martin Scorsese that traces the life of Bob Dylan, and his impact on American popular music and culture of the 20th century. The two-part film, which focuses on the singer-songwriter's life and music from 1961-66, includes never-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives intertwined with Dylan's during that time.