Film Institute at Hi-Desert Cultural Center
Control stands apart from most music biopics because it refuses to turn Curtis into a simple icon or legend. Instead of building toward a triumphant performance or a tidy moral, the film lingers on the small spaces where Curtis’s life actually unfolded–small homes, rehearsal rooms, backstage hallways, and hospitals.
Dreaming in Black and White: Control with Producer Orian Williams in Joshua Tree Read More »
Kenneth Anger considered cinema not as storytelling but as an act of Magick in the tradition of Aleister Crowley’s “art and science of causing change in accordance with one’s will.” The film is not meant to explain itself. Its creator believed that meaning, like ritual, is experiential; it is something the viewer feels, not interprets.
Kenneth Anger’s “Lucifer Rising” and the Ritual of Becoming Read More »
Ondi Timoner has a singular talent for capturing lighting in a bottle. Her body of work is full of indelible portraits of figures who capture a moment in time, and often they are characters that no one else would have thought to follow, or could endure following.
JOURNEYS THROUGH THE PAST: TWO BY ONDI TIMONER Read More »
It’s a miracle that someone like Wadleigh wound up in charge of the massive enterprise of Woodstock, and it endures because it is the work of someone with a romantic poet’s sensibility, rather than Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock: Three Days of Peace, Love & Music Read More »
The Hi-Desert Cultural Center is proud to present a special screening of ENO, the first-ever generative documentary film in a one-night-only event featuring an introduction by Orian Williams, one of the revolutionary film’s producers.
Hi-Desert Cultural Center Presents Groundbreaking Generative Documentary Film: ENO Read More »
Elvis, the award-winning 2022 musical spectacle by master showman Baz Luhrmann, remains fresh and vital in 2025. Looking back at the criticism of the film, high praise as well as dim dismissal, everyone seems to have undersold the theme of the artist as chattel in the entertainment industry, which has only become more urgent in the two years since.
The Devil In Disguise: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Read More »
The American film director William Friedkin, a devotee who introduced Blow-Up to audiences numerous times over the course of his life, described the film as “a mystery without a solution.” The struggle to reconcile image and reality is part of why Blow-Up resonated so strongly with audiences in 1967. Unsettled and searching, Thomas presents as an archetypal lost soul of the era.
Lost, Lost, Lost: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and The Swinging Sixties Read More »
Filmed in only 16 days and earning the coveted Best Actor award at Cannes, Perfect Days tells the story of a quiet and alert man who lives in solitude in one of the world’s densest cities, vacillating between beatific contentment and cold dread.
Perfect Days—Savoring perfection of the fleeting and ephemeral Read More »
As soon as David Byrne walked onto the screen with his boombox, the energy in the room was electric.
“STOP MAKING SENSE” Packs Joshua Tree Theater Read More »
Throughout Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day For Night, a callow movie star played by Jean-Pierre Leaud asks “Are women magic?” The most agreed-upon interpretation is that Leaud’s character, Alphonse, is really asking whether movies are magic.
Insight Into a Truffaut Masterpiece Read More »
