Paradise Now: The Living Theater in Amerika

Jan 23, 1969

0h 45m

★ 6.0

Overview

A harrowing, gorgeous, in-your-face-and-mind 45-minute black-and-white film by Marty Topp, produced by Ira Cohen for Universal Mutant. “Marty Topp’s beautiful film of ‘Paradise Now’ reveals how the theories of revolutionary change and the experience of sexual liberation are not separate paths to the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Practiced together they are a single thrust, encompassing both political action and sensual joy, leading to the dreamed-of terrestrial paradise.

Genres

Documentary

Drama

Fantasy

Paradise Now: The Living Theater in Amerika Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

Julian Beck

Judith Malina

Commissioned work by Julian Beck and members of The Living Theatre (featuring Beck and Judith Malina, co-founders of The Living Theatre, in performance) for broadcast on KQED-TV, San Francisco. The Dilexi Series represents a pioneering effort to present works created by artists specifically for broadcast.

5.1

Love and Anger

May 29, 1969

Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.

6.3

The Connection

Feb 15, 1962

A title card announces that the film is a result of found footage assembled by cameraman J.J. Burden working for the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jim Dunn, who has disappeared. Leach, a heroin addict, introduces the audience to his apartment where other heroin addicts, a mix of current and former jazz musicians, are waiting for Cowboy, their drug connection, to appear. Things go out of control as the men grow increasingly nervous and the cameraman keeps recording.

0.0

The Connection

Jan 1, 1959

A professional recording of the official play. The play has a play-within-a-play format, with characters Jim Dunn as the "producer" and Jaybird as the "writer" attempting to stage a production about the underbelly of society using "real" addicts. Some of the addicts are jazz musicians. They all (except for the "producer", "writer", and two "photographers") have one thing in common: they are waiting for their drug dealer, their "connection". The dialogue of the characters is interspersed with jazz music.

6.6

The Brig

Sep 20, 1964

Jonas Mekas’s film captures The Living Theatre’s stage production of The Brig, an unflinching portrait of life inside a U.S. Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. Over the course of a single day, prisoners endure relentless drills, abuse, and dehumanization, exposing the brutality of military discipline with stark immediacy.

0.0

Emergency: The Living Theatre

Sep 9, 1968

a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)

4.2

Paradise Now

Mar 21, 1970

At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressionist colouring 'injected' by electronic means, this emerges as a hypnotic transmutation of a theatrical event into poetic cinema, capturing the ambiance and frenzy of the original. No documentary record could have done it justice.

No Image Available

0.0

Après la Passion selon Sade

Jan 1, 1968

No overview available.

8.0

This American Wife

May 20, 2021

The body of a Real Housewife is an apparatus, an assembly of parts—hair, lips, dress, falsies, mic pack, cell phone, wine stem, camera, restaurant, brand, identity. This body is maintained and degraded, intoxicated and cleansed, in seasons and cycles, systems of supply and denial. The self needs a medium. Who cares who you are when you’re alone anymore?

0.0

Cour d'honneur de Jérôme Bel - Avignon 2013

Jul 19, 2013

Jérôme Bel's show features the memories of spectators at the Avignon Festival.

0.0

Vênus Visitou São Paulo

Aug 22, 2025

No overview available.

0.0

Prism of Gray Rock

Dec 17, 2025

A woman who has shut out the light of her emotions, Doah. Amid a bitter divorce and custody battle, she locks every feeling into darkness using the "Gray Rock" strategy. As a school counselor, she heals students’ wounds while hardening her own pain into cold stone, concealing cracks in her identity between a demanding mother and an emotionally numb workplace. Everything holds—until a single outburst during a visit with her daughter fractures her armored shell.

0.0

北アルプス山岳救助隊・紫門一鬼８　白馬八方尾根　雪どけの叫び

Oct 29, 2006

No overview available.

6.1

Carrie

Nov 4, 2002

An awkward, telekinetic teenage girl's lonely life is dominated by relentless bullying at school and an oppressive religious fanatic mother at home. When her tormentors pull a humiliating prank at the senior prom, she unleashes a horrifying chaos on everyone, leaving nothing but destruction in her wake.

7.0

City of Men

Aug 31, 2007

Best buddies Acerola and Laranjinha, about to turn 18, discover things about their missing fathers' pasts which will shatter their solid friendship, in the middle of a war between rival drug gangs from Rio's favelas.

Paradise Now: The Living Theater in Amerika

Overview

Genres

Paradise Now: The Living Theater in Amerika Trailers