Sarah Morris

Taking its title from an all-day/all-night convenience store, “AM/PM” examines the famous Las Vegas Strip, portraying the disorienting world of corporate hotels and casinos which utilise and redefine the spectacle in relation to architecture. “AM/PM” posits the concept of distraction itself as a strategy and the city as a conspiracy, which manipulates and directs the visitor.

Alexander Kluge, the legendary German theorist and writer, student under Adorno and Horkheimer, a lawyer for the Frankfurter Schule, and paramount filmmaker of the New German Cinema is being interviewed by Sarah Morris in the recently finished but not yet utilized architecture of the controversial philharmonic space in Hamburg designed by Herzog and De Neuron: the Elbphilharmonie.

A portrait of the legendary Hollywood screenwriter, director, producer and actor that examines the man whose work couples the surface of modern America's economic and cultural success with dark underbelly conspiracy.

Midtown, shot on 16mm in New York during a single day, in which the artist hired a news crew to film a specific list of coordinates in Manhattan - an index for the artist. The film depicts both the power of the corporations and the anonymity of the street framing the flux of the city.

An idiosyncratic portrait of Dr. Georg Sieber, who served as the head psychologist of the Olympic Police. Dr. Sieber was present on the tragic morning on September 5th, 1972, when members of the terrorist group Black September attacked and took hostage the members of the visiting Israeli Olympic Team.

A collaborative essay film regarding Fritz Lang.

Sarah Morris's Rio continues her investigation into urban psychological landscapes, this time moving her focus to Rio de Janeiro, a vast and contradictory metropolis. Tracing the culture and undercurrents of the city, Morris captures individuals and sites as varied as the office of architect Oscar Niemeyer, a party in the 'City of God', a famed talk show host, Bossa Nova muse, Brahma beer factory, the largest assembly line in South America, and the factory of the Dolores underwear company.

The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Curator and architect and the confused boundaries therein. Points on a Line complicates the idea of the copy and the original and the chronology of modernism

Sakura traces the culture and undercurrents of the city of Osaka, capturing individuals and sites as varied as the famous Sakura paint and pastel factory, UNESCO-recognized Bunraku theater, late pre-eminent Japanese architect Kira Kurosawa's police prefect, the Yamazaki Suntory Distillery and the Nobel Prize-winning molecular scientist Sonya Yamanaka, during the anticipated moment of the blossoming of cherry trees in Japan.

“Beijing”, an 86-minute 35mm film, focuses on one of the most intricate and ambiguous international broadcasted events of past years – the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. “Beijing” observes the overwhelmingly perplexing and contradictory economy and authority of China, made all the more resonant in current climate of the global cities.

Sarah Morris' fifth short documentary film, investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city. It reveals a new cityscape of Los Angeles by tracking its de-centered plan, complex architecture, and most importantly its crucial role as a center of film production. “Los Angeles” posits the city as a hyper-narrative within a very distinct duration of time. Here the city is caught at its most ebullient and narcissistic moment: the week leading up to the Oscars. A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score, range from the rehearsals and pre-production moments of the Academy Awards to a John Lautner house, Brad Pitt on the set of “Mr. And Mrs. Smith” at Twentieth Century Fox, the final taping of Hollywood Squares at CBS, the legendary Bonaventure Hotel, Pat Kingsley at work, I.M. Pei’s Creative Artist’s Agency, Mulholland Drive, the Department of Water and Power, and the Vanity Fair party.

Operating between a documentary, the biography of a city and a form of nonnarrative fiction, Miami shifts between sites of production, leisure, and work.

Sarah Morris made the film “Capital” in Washington during the final days of the Clinton administration. It is a record of now unimaginable access to the centers of power. Capital continues Morris’ investigation of the way we decode and therefore begin to understand the built world around us. “Capital”, first exhibited at the National Gallery in Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof) draws a complex and layered city portrait. The Mall, the White House Press Office, the World Bank, uniformed members of the Secret Service, the Presidential motorcade, the Watergate Complex, the Kennedy Center, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, The Pentagon, the daily activities of the President and an overall consideration of the city form a sequence of reflection points for her series of paintings. While her earlier paintings from New York and Las Vegas offered a new examination of the codes and structures of our urban environment, these new works introduce a revised mapping of power, desire, urbanism and design.

Investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city. When Mies van der Rohe emigrated to America in 1938, with the help of Philip Johnson, he created an image of America. Continuing to play with duality of place, Morris' Chicago is tandem with Points on a Line, shifting the lens to a panorama of the American city in transition.

Explores the psycho-geographical urban landscape of Abu Dhabi, its rapid growth, financial prosperity, history, spectacle, and illusion while capturing the citiy's itinerant workforce, architecture, and its potential transition away from oil as a main economic resource.

Strange Magic reveals sights of preproduction and postproduction, so in this instance tracking Frank Gehry's philosophy both through a recorded quotation, the corporation's multiple holdings, and the spectacle of the city of Paris itself.