Oscilloscope

Word is Out debuted in 1977 as the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by gay filmmakers. The Mariposa Film Group comprising of Peter Adair (Absolutely Positive), Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk), Lucy Massie Phenix (Winter Soldier) and Veronica Selver sought to create a film free of political didactics and to simply tell the stories of growing up gay in America. After conducting 140 interviews, the filmmakers selected twenty-six people of various lifestyles, races, ages and backgrounds. What they achieved was a cornerstone in Gay Rights. Audiences were startled and moved by these stories told by the film's participants. The documentary was released in theaters around the world and shown on prime-time television. It helped untold numbers of people accept themselves, their friends and their families, and had an impact on American culture. Word is Out quickly became a landmark in cinema, but time had taken its toll on the existing prints and the film was rarely seen. The Outfest Legacy Project and UCLA Film & Television Archive restored Word is Out with the generous contribution of the David Bohnett Foundation, creating a high-definition video for this DVD premiere. Ripe for rediscovery, the film is at once a record of past struggles, an occasion for reflecting on how far we still have to go, and a masterpiece of the documentary form. Viewers will be charmed, touched and perhaps galvanized to action by the film's emotionally breathtaking blend of candor, humor, love and humanity. View Details

Selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, The Exiles (1961) is an incredible feature film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California. Bunker Hill was then a blighted residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski. The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects.

The film features Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds. The film shares a curious number of surface similarities with Charles Burnett's legendary Killer of Sheep: they were both gritty, frills-free depictions of marginalized Los Angeles communities made within about a decade from each other by young filmmakers who were both compared to John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica, they both have existed for decades without theatrical release, they both have been featured in Thom Andersen's film Los Angeles Plays Itself, they both have been restored by Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archives and they both are Milestone Film & Video releases.

One of the significant distinctions between The Exiles and Killer of Sheep is that MacKenzie (unlike Burnett) was a definitive outsider to the community he was filming--he was a well-to-do white man from the East coast amongst Native Americans, Mexicans and Filipinos in a low-income L.A. community. Regardless, his sensitivity and his genuinely penetrating interest in attempting to understand the people in his film via filming them shines through (he, like Burnett, involved the stars of the film in the writing and filming process), curbing the tendencies towards sentimentalism and fetishization that often emerge in attempts to represent "the other." Despite (or because of) the fact that no other films at the time were (and still very few now are) depicting Native American peoples (aside from the overblown stereotypes in Westerns) let alone urban Native Americans, The Exiles could not find a distributor willing to risk putting it out theatrically, and so over the years it fell into obscurity, known and loved by cinephiles and admired for its originality and honesty by such Native American filmmakers as Chris Eyres (Smoke Signals, 1998) and Ben-alex Dupris (experimental filmmaker and writer) but remaining largely unseen to the public, including communities like the ones depicted in the film. The 2008 theatrical release will provide the opportunity to redeem this fact. View Details

Remembered mostly for his magnificent performance as the Japanese officer in The Bridge over the River Kwai, few filmgoers realize that Sessue Hayakawa was one of the great stars of the silent cinema. In many films he played a dashing, romantic lead - a rarity for Asian actors in Hollywood, even today. Hayakawa became so popular and powerful that he was able to start Haworth Pictures to control his own destiny. The Dragon Painter was the finest of the Haworth productions. Beautifully acted, gorgeously shot (with Yosemite Valley filling in for the Japanese landscape), and lovingly directed, the film is an absolute marvel.

Hayakawa plays Tatsu, an artist living as a hermit in the wilds of Japan. Thought mad by the local villagers, he believes that his princess fiancée has been captured by a dragon. His obsession leads to artistic inspiration. It isn't until a surveyor comes across Tatsu in the mountains that his genius is discovered. The surveyor informs the famed artist Kano Indara about his discovery. Kano is desperate to find a male heir to teach his art, but when Tatsu meets Kano's daughter (played by Hayakawa's wife, Tsuru Aoki) and sees only his lost princess, a clash of wills brings the household to the brink of disaster.

Long considered lost, The Dragon Painter was rediscovered in a French distribution print and brought to the George Eastman House for restoration with the original tints. The film survives today as a tribute to Hayakawa's great artistry and a shining example of Asian-American cinema. View Details

Killer of Sheep examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse.

Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a coffee cup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife in the living room, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life — sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.

Killer of Sheep was shot on location in Watts in a series of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, most of which was grant money. Finished in 1977 and shown sporadically, its reputation grew and grew until it won a prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival.

Since then, the Library of Congress has declared it a national treasure as one of the first fifty on the National Film Registry and the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the "100 Essential Films" of all time. However, due to the expense of the music rights, the film was never shown theatrically or made available on video. It has only been seen on poor quality 16mm prints at few and far between museum and festival showings.

Now, thirty years after its debut, the new 35mm print of Killer of Sheep, brilliantly restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive, is ready for its long-awaited international release.

Milestone's premiere of the restored Killer of Sheep was at the 2007 Berlinale Film Festival and the theatrical release begins in Spring of this year. View Details

Started only a week after the Cuban missile crisis and designed to be Cuba's answer to both Sergei Eisenstein's propaganda masterpiece, Potemkin and Jean-Luc Godard's freewheeling romance, Breathless, I Am Cuba turned out to be something quite unique - a wildly schizophrenic celebration of Communist kitsch, mixing Slavic solemnity with Latin sensuality. The plot, or rather plots, feverishly explore the seductive, decadent (and marvelously photogenic) world of Batista's Cuba - deliriously juxtaposing images of rich Americans and bikini-clad beauties sipping cocktails poolside with scenes of ramshackle slums filled with hungry children and gaunt old people. Using wide-angle lenses that distort and magnify and filters that transform palm trees into giant white feathers, Urusevsky's acrobatic camera achieves wild gravity-defying angles as it glides effortlessly through long continuous shots. But I Am Cuba is not just a catalog of bravura technique - it also succeeds in exploring the innermost feelings of the characters and their often desperate situations. Shown unsubtitled at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I Am Cuba received two standing ovations - during the screening. The first movie ever jointly presented by master filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, I Am Cuba is one of the great discoveries in cinema. It will change your view of cinema forever! View Details

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? has been acclaimed by critics and audiences throughout the world as a film of remarkable power and beauty. In a remote mountain monastery above a bustling city, an old Zen master, his conflicted young apprentice, and an orphaned boy live a life of quiet contemplation. The old master, nearing his end, wishes to make the ceremony of his death his final lesson to his apprentice, who is struggling to come to terms with the worldly life he left behind. Meanwhile the young boy has his own awakening to mortality as he attempts to nurse a bird he thoughtlessly injured with a stone. The title of the film is a Zen koan — a paradox meant to aid meditation — that provokes the question of the distinction between leaving and arriving. This magnificent film, quietly powerful and astonishingly rich in formal beauty, is not only a cinematic gem, but an evocative meditation on the cyclical nature of existence. Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? does not seek to explain the tenets of Zen Buddhism so much as illuminate the mysteries of life that lie behind them. Milestone is pleased to present the definitive version of the film, with never before seen footage, remastered and painstakingly re-cut by the visionary director Bae Yong-kyun himself. View Details

The Big Animal (Duze Zwierze), scripted by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski and shot in shimmering black-and-white by cinematographer Pawel Edelman (Academy Award® nominee for Roman Polanski's The Pianist) is a lovely, small film that exposes greed and pettiness while celebrating the most beautiful human themes: Love, friendship and tolerance.

When the circus leaves town, Zygmunt Sawicki and his wife Marysia unwittingly adopt a camel into their family. The couple quickly forms a close bond with the nameless camel. At first the townspeople, too, are enthralled with the giant animal, since it is a welcome distraction from their everyday routine. As the bond between the couple and their camel grows stronger, the town-people suddenly begin to ostracize them...

Renowned filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Decalogue, Three Colors Trilogy) wrote the screenplay (based on the novel, Wielblad, by Kazimierz Orlos) in the 1970s, at the height of political oppression and social upheaval during the Communist era. This hothouse environment cultivated Poland's Cinema of Moral Anxiety and subversive criticism through the arts when it was difficult to speak openly. Mr. Kieslowki's friend Elzbieta Scotti safeguarded the script of The Big Animal and after his death, returned it to his widow. View Details

Set against the backdrop of the turbulent period in the late 1960s leading up to Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan, The Clay Bird tells the story of a family torn apart by religion and war. Anu, a shy young boy from rural East Pakistan (Bangladesh, as it is now known) is sent away by his father Kazi, an orthodox Muslim, to a Madrasah - or Islamic- school. Far from his family and the warmth of his region's Hindu festivities, Anu struggles to adapt to the school's harsh monastic life.

As the political divisions in the country intensify, an increasing split develops between moderate and extremist forces within the Madrasah. Back in the village, these same tensions create a growing divide between the stubborn but confused Kazi and his increasingly independent wife, Ayesha.

Touching upon themes of religious tolerance, cultural diversity, and the complexity of Islam, The Clay Bird has universal relevance in a crisis-ridden world. View Details

Beyond the Rocks, the silent romance starring film legends Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino was long considered one of the great "lost" films from the Hollywood golden age, only a one-minute fragment was known to exist in the Nederlands Filmmuseum.

Lost for over eighty years, film cataloguers at the Nederlands Filmmuseum were amazed to find the first two nitrate reels of Beyond the Rocks when inventorying a vast collection of nitrate bequeathed to them by a film collector from Haarlem, they were amazed. The Filmmuseum staff then searched for many tense months until they found and identified all the missing reels of the film. Beyond the Rocks has been restored under the auspices of Filmmuseum archivists Mark-Paul Meyer and Giovanna Fossati, with lab work by Haghefilm Conservation. The film premieres with a brand-new score by the well-known Dutch composer Henny Vrienten.

When Paramount approached Swanson to star with Valentino, the studio intended the assignment to be "punishment" for her demands for greater control. Swanson never let on that the two actors often rode horses together in the Hollywood hills and that she was actually delighted to costar with such a close friend.

For their project, Paramount chose a well-loved novel by popular author Elinor Glyn whose romantic pot-boilers often featured strong women and virile men in exotic locales. (She also was the author of It, which made Clara Bow an international sensation.) Sam Wood, was assigned to direct the production. Wood went on to have a long and respected career that included such superior films as Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kings Row, Pride of the Yankees and For Whom the Bell Tolls. View Details

In the earliest years of the twentieth century, enterprising traveling showmen in the north of England hired pioneer filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon to shoot footage of local people going about their everyday activities. These films would be shown later at nearby fairgrounds, town halls and neighborhood theaters. Workers, school children, sports fans and seaside vacationers all flocked to see themselves miraculously captured on screen!

The astonishing discovery of the original Mitchell & Kenyon negatives in Blackburn, England - in a basement about to be demolished - has been described as film's equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb. Preserved and restored by the bfi National Film and Television Archive in collaboration with the University of Sheffield National Fairground Archive and featuring a hauntingly beautiful score by In The Nursery, this treasure trove of extraordinary footage provides an unparalleled record of everyday life in the years before World War I. Mesmerizing scenes of trolley cars and crowded streets, soccer matches, temperance parades, throngs of workers leaving the factory and a myriad of simple pleasures transport us to another - lost - world. The effect is as if H.G. Wells' marvelous time machine had come to life.

The specially commissioned score for Electric Edwardians was written and performed by In The Nursery - the Sheffield-based musical project formed by twin brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone. View Details

Winter Soldier is a documentary chronicle of the extraordinary Winter Soldier Investigation conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Detroit during the winter of 1971. Veterans from all branches of the US military came from across the country to speak out about the atrocities they had committed and witnessed while stationed in Vietnam.

Recognizing the urgency and historical importance of the investigation, a remarkable group of independent filmmakers came together to document the veterans' testimonies. Calling themselves Winterfilm, their collective included Fred Aronow, Nancy Baker, Rhetta Barron, Robert Fiore, David Gillis, David Grubin, Barbara Jarvis, Barbara Kopple, Michael Lesser, Lee Osborne, Lucy Massie Phenix, Roger Phenix, Benay Rubenstein and Michael Weil. (Members of this group of filmmakers have gone on individually to make some of the most important documentaries of our time, winning several Academy Awards in the process.)

Over the course of four days and nights, using donated equipment and film stock, the Winterfilm members shot footage of more than 125 veterans (including a very young John Kerry). These men, who represented every major combat unit that saw action in Vietnam, gave eyewitness testimony to war crimes and atrocities they either participated in or witnessed. Members of the collective next spent eight months editing the raw footage from the hearings together with film clips and snapshots from Vietnam into the 95-minute feature documentary Winter Soldier. Because the proceedings went virtually unreported by the media, Winter Soldier is the only audiovisual record of this historic turning point in American history. View Details