1938: Shostakovich encourages his pupil Fleischmann to write an opera based on the Chekhov story 'Rothschild's violin'. Fleischmann is killed during the siege of Leningrad. Shostakovich completes the orchestration, but in 1948 is advised to suppress the opera, during Stalin's campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans". Jewish motifs enter Shostakovich's own work.
Corky, a tough female ex-convict working on an apartment renovation in a Chicago building, meets a couple living next door, Caesar, a paranoid mobster, and Violet, his seductive girlfriend, who is immediately attracted to her.
Comprised of a series of bizarre and unrelated episodes, this absurd Italian comedy earned the inglorious honor of being the film with the most audience walkouts at the 1996 Venice Film Festival.
BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines.
A jaded Lower East Side couple have become bored of straight sex, in a bid to spice things up, they decide to imitate some rough sex scenes as seen on TV.
A Catholic school newcomer falls in with a clique of teen witches who wield their powers against all who dare to cross them -- be they teachers, rivals or meddlesome parents.
A middle-aged couple has a drifter enter their lives. The fish-store owners find that the mysterious young man awakens the couple in ways they didn't expect.
