Looking for movies, shows, games, or books similar to Dance of Darkness? Check out these recommendations on mosaic.
Filmed in the Guatemalan Highlands during a 1980 journey, Edín Vélez’s experimental video essay offers a lyrical portrait of Mayan life. Avoiding conventional narration or ethnographic analysis, the film observes gestures, landscapes, and daily rituals through slow motion and expressive camera techniques, while American news broadcasts evoke the political conflict surrounding the community, creating a meditation on cultural resilience in a changing world.
Filmed over a year in Japan, Edín Vélez’s experimental video essay examines the tension between tradition and modernity in Japanese culture. Through a nonlinear collage of layered images—ranging from bullet trains and corporate life to Kabuki, Sumo, and Shinto ritual—the film explores the concept of ma, the “interval” or charged space between things that shapes rhythm, balance, and meaning.
Oblique Strategist Too is a multilayered, tangential portrait of composer Brian Eno, and an evocative essay on the creative process. Eno's perspectives on his music and working methods surface elliptically, through interviews and footage of him in the studio and in lectures. Eno emerges as a meticulous musician, articulate critic, and, ultimately, an inscrutable personality. The tape's title is taken from a set of cards bearing aphorisms, which Eno uses as a random element of advice in his working process. Velez uses intricate audio and video effects to heighten the elusive nature of Eno's music and character. He begins the tape with a quote from Heraclitus: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" a paradox that eminently suits his subject matter.
Drawing on rare performances, interviews, animations, and experimental film, this documentary surveys the formative years of electronic music from 1948 to 1980. Featuring pioneering composers and inventors—including Milton Babbitt and Leon Theremin—the film explores the experimental technologies, academic laboratories, and creative struggles that shaped the early evolution of electronic sound.
Discover 4 famous Japanese murderers: Takahashi Oden, the last woman beheaded in Japan, Sada Abe, a crazy lover, Kunihiko Kodaira, a rapist-killer and finally, the Toyokaku case, a woman who did everything to own a hotel.
Three stories of moral sickness set during Japan’s prosperous Genroku era are told in this bloody follow-up to the sexploitation classic Shogun’s Joy of Torture, the politically incorrect moral lessons paint a trio of tales of tragic heroines caught up in violence, sadomasochism, incest and torture.
After escaping from an insane asylum, a medical student assumes the identity of a mysterious dead man, who appears to be his doppelganger, and gets lured to a sinister island ruled by a mad scientist and his malformed men.
Akemi is a dragon tattooed leader of the Tachibana Yakuza clan. In a duel with a rival gang Akemi slashes the eyes of an opponent and a black cat appears, to lap the blood from the gushing wound. The cat along with the eye-victim go on to pursue Akemi’s gang in revenge, leaving a trail of dead Yakuza girls, their dragon tattoos skinned from their bodies.
"Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis" is a visually striking film portrait shot on location in Japan with the participation of the major Butoh choreographers and their companies. Although Butoh is often viewed as Japan's equivalent of modern dance, in actuality it has little to do with the rational principles of modernism. Butoh is a theater of improvisation which places the personal experiences of the dancer on center-stage. By reestablishing the ancient Japanese connection of dance, music, and masks, and by recalling the Buddhist death dances of rural Japan, Butoh incorporates much traditional theater. At the same time, it is a movement of resistance against the abandonment of traditional culture to a highly organized consumer-oriented society.
The Making-of James Cameron's Avatar. It shows interesting parts of the work on the set.