Bruce Jenkins

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Blue

This film in all of its various guises (theatrical feature, stage reading/performance, gallery installation) conveys the same elemental lessons about art and life while elegantly displaying Jarman's painterly and poetic practices.

The Chelsea Girls

Effectively the Citizen Kane of underground cinema, Warhol's sprawling narrative vividly displays the beauty of his imagery and his ability to capture powerful emotions in the most unlikely contexts.

Close-up

The sense of the real that dominates so much of the director's fiction films emerges here full-blown in this documentary about cinema and the lives of people it transforms.

Crossroads

Returning to themes of his first film A Movie, this epic Bicentennial project appropriates a broad array of government-produced archival recordings of the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test to capture the terrible beauty of total annihilation, set to contemporary scores by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn

The ultimate film about the theatrical experience of moviegoing, which shifts the focus off-screen and on to the theatre's staff (ticket-seller/custodian and projectionist), a motley crew of action-movie fans, and a group of lonely men looking for intimacy. A piece of slow cinema with a sly sense of humour.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

A post-New Wave feature that vividly reworks counter-cinema formal principles while reinventing what mainstream cinema would label a 'women's picture'. It remains that and far more – inspiring generations of artists working with moving images.

Killer of Sheep

A fulfilment of the promise of the New American Cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s that emerged nearly two decades later on the other side of the continent as the crowning achievement of the "LA Rebellion." By turns comic and lyrical, personal and political, this work remains a compelling portrait of an American family.

Man with a Movie Camera

A day in the life of a city as the starting point for a masterclass in the art of filmmaking.

(Nostalgia)

The opening film in a series that would come to redefine the logic of film viewing while capturing aspects of the artist's own biography, here working as an earnest still photographer trying to find a link between his art and that of his contemporaries.

Sans soleil

A treatise on travel, on history, on art and on life, Marker's film unfolds like an epistolary novel in dialogue with itself. His virtuosity with the camera is matched by the brilliance of the montage.