The Real Thing
Synopsis
After filming Claes Oldenburg's Ray Gun Theater Happenings in 1962, and inspired by the saturation of all facets of modern life with sexuality, Saroff set out to create a new film in 1963-4. Joined by three artist/actors—Lucas Samaras, Peter Holbrook, and Bob Stanley—Saroff filmed in the Manhattan subways, on rooftops, in the workroom of an IBM office filled with giant computers, and in the buildings of lower Broadway. He also appropriated imagery from television, such as liquor and cigarette advertisements, and spliced in found footage of an old "blue" movie. Very much a document of its time, this is a silent, black-and-white "art film" photographed on location with a hand-held camera using only available light. The editing emphasizes the mechanical artificiality of consumerism as opposed to the earthiness of the everyday, with its crude but honest appetites, presumptions, and vanity.
You might also like

The film goes behind the scenes of the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix.
The Matrix Revisited

The streets of the Bronx are owned by '60s youth gangs where the joy and pain of adolescence is lived. Philip Kaufman tells his take on the novel by Richard Price about the history of the Italian-American gang ‘The Wanderers.’
The Wanderers

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

Based on the extraordinary true story of the European city’s 1973 bank heist and hostage crisis that was documented in the 1974 New Yorker article “The Bank Drama” by Daniel Lang. The events grasped the world’s attention when the hostages bonded with their captors and turned against the authorities, giving rise to the psychological phenomenon known as “Stockholm Syndrome.”
Stockholm

The most famous murder scene in movie history comprises 78 camera settings and 52 cuts: the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. 78/52 tells the story of the man behind the curtain and his greatest obsession.
78/52

Los Angeles, 1969. TV star Rick Dalton, a struggling actor specializing in westerns, and stuntman Cliff Booth, his best friend, try to survive in a constantly changing movie industry. Dalton is the neighbor of the young and promising actress and model Sharon Tate, who has just married the prestigious Polish director Roman Polanski…
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

John Gotti, the head of a small New York mafia crew breaks a few of the old family rules. He rises to become the head of the Gambino family and the most well-known mafia boss in America. Life is good, but suspicion creeps in, and greed, rule-breaking and his high public profile all threaten to topple him.
Gotti

Davey Gordon, a New York City boxer at the end of his career, falls for dancer Gloria Price. However, their budding relationship is interrupted by Gloria's violent boss, Vincent Rapallo, who has eyes for Gloria. The two decide to skip town, but before they can, Vincent and his thugs abduct Gloria, and Davey is forced to search for her among the most squalid corners of the city, with his enemy hiding in the shadows.
Killer's Kiss

A young filmmaker in 1960s Paris juggles directing a cheesy sci-fi debacle, directing his own personal art film, coping with his crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, and a new-found infatuation with the sci-fi film's starlet.
CQ

A subjective documentary that explores various theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments.
Room 237

A showman introduces a small coastal town to a unique movie experience and capitalizes on the Cuban Missile crisis hysteria with a kitschy horror extravaganza combining film effects, stage props and actors in rubber suits in this salute to the B-movie.
Matinee

Offbeat documentarian Chris Smith provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Jim Carrey adopted the persona of idiosyncratic comedian Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon.
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

A hitman, his boss, an art dealer and a money-laundering scheme that accidentally turns the assassin into an overnight avant-garde sensation, one that forces her to play the art world against the underworld.
The Kill Room

Hollywood, 1930s. Tod Hackett, a young painter who tries to make his way as an art director in the lurid world of film industry, gets infatuated with his neighbor Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who prefers the life that Homer Simpson, a lone accountant, can offer her.
The Day of the Locust

Chelios faces a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working.
Crank: High Voltage

A photographer takes up newsreel shooting to impress a secretary.
The Cameraman

After a former model is drowned in her bathtub, Detective James Halloran and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon attempt to piece together her murder.
The Naked City

A struggling young dancer finds herself drawn in by dark forces when a peculiar, well-connected older couple promise her a shot at fame.
Apartment 7A

An in-depth investigation into the private world of the American writer J. D. Salinger (1919-2010), who lived most of his life behind the impenetrable wall of a self-imposed seclusion: how his dramatic experiences during World War II influenced his life and work, his relationships with very young women, his obsessive writing methods, his many literary secrets.
Salinger

In 1976, four working-class friends come of age in The Hamptons, on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, as clam diggers, as were their fathers and their grandfathers before them. They must cope with and learn to face the changing times in both their personal lives and their neighborhood.