Robert Wilson
Director · 1941 – 2025 · Waco, Texas, USA
Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright. Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.
Movies14
Movie7.7DocumentaryAn account of the professional and personal life of renowned American photographer Annie Leibovitz, from her early artistic endeavors to her international success as a photojournalist, war reporter, and pop culture chronicler.
Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens
2007 · 25 votes
Movie6.0DocumentaryWe look back at more than half a century of mysterious artistic creation while trying to crack a unique artistic code. Why are people moved to tears when Robert “Bob” Wilson puts minimalistic petrol pumps into a production of Shakespeare’s sonnets? Why does merciless repetition change our understanding of something? Together with Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe or Marina Abramović we trace back our own experience of Bob’s art. Is it true what Philipp Glass the collaborator of the milestone piece “Einstein on the Beach” laughingly and with apparent pleasure exclaims “what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything!”?
Robert Wilson – Die Schönheit des Geheimnisvollen
Robert Wilson: The Beauty of the Mysterious
2022 · 1 votes
Movie6.7DocumentaryIn this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
2007 · 10 votes
Movie6.4DocumentaryDocumentary from Katharina Otto pays homage to famed stage designer Robert Wilson, who overcame childhood learning disabilities growing up in Waco, Texas, and rose to become one of the most respected avant-garde artists in late 1960s New York. As much a tale of social injustice as a portrait of an artist, this mix of interviews and live performance is testimony to how Wilson's early challenges influenced his creative expression.
Absolute Wilson
2006 · 5 votes
Movie9.0DocumentaryRobert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson’s ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he confronts a hectic work schedule, funding difficulties and relentless international travel in attempt to complete his preparations. The film examines Wilson’s unique theatrical style during The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which involves the continual creation of evocative stage sets, owing to a unique juxtaposition of movement, sound, text and image. Known for his precise, painterly images Wilson’s work derives more from visual art than the orthodox literary traditions of theatre. As a result, Wilson often challenges actors to perform in a boldly minimalist style, as well as collaborating with non-actors, such as young autistic poet Christopher Knowles in Einstein on the Beach.
Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars
1987 · 2 votes
Movie9.0DocumentaryThe creative processes of avant-garde composer Philip Glass and progressive director/designer Robert Wilson are examined in this film. It documents their collaboration on this tradition breaking opera.
Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera
1985 · 2 votes
Movie5.7DramaProduced in an era before 24-hour programming cycles, Video 50 was initially used as a late night filler on TV stations in Germany, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Random, surreal, and unexpected, Video 50 resembles the dream cycle of a dormant TV station after it conscious programming has ceased. Its structure and form anticipate the dissociated sequence of moving images we are now accustomed to encountering on YouTube and social media.
Video 50
1978 · 3 votes
- Movie10.0Documentary
Do Not Be Anxious — Be Fast And Be Quiet
2010 · 1 votes
MovieDocumentaryA captivating history of the nation's oldest performing arts center - which largely mirrors the evolution of experimental and progressive performing arts in 20th century America - BAM150 chronicles the vibrant past, present and future of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Through footage of recent performances, intimate interviews, and an astonishing treasure trove of 150 years' worth of archival materials, BAM150 is a testament to the power and stamina of the institution that established Brooklyn as a cultural mecca-serving as a home to such greats as Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt, Edwin Booth, Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson, Mark Morris, Laurie Anderson, and Pina Bausch.
BAM150
2012
Movie6.5DocumentaryThis hourlong semi-documentary records the musical stage collaboration between director Robert Wilson and veteran performance artist Marina Abramovic. Also included is a wealth of background material about Abramovic's life and earlier works.
Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic
2012 · 4 votes
MovieDocumentaryExplores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.
The Art of Time
2009
Movie8.0TV MovieDramaA collaboration in which Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller let Molière die, imagine his death in tableaux with text passages recited by Müller himself. "Cinema watches Death at work." Wilson's actors watch Molière die: their vigil is hard work. Müller's comment: "The poem watches a dying man at work, his name is Molière. The poem is not a film. The film watches an actor playing a dying man called Molière."
La mort de Molière
1994 · 1 votes
MovieDocumentaryA behind-the-scenes documentary of "The Black Rider/Der schwarze Reiter" or "The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets" a "musical fable" in the avant-garde tradition created through the collaboration of theatre director Robert Wilson, musician Tom Waits, and writer William S. Burroughs. The story is based on a German folktale called "Der Freischütz", which had previously been made into an opera by Carl Maria von Weber. Here we meet the makers and the ensemble of the Thalia Theater production in Hamburg that opened on March 31, 1990.
MovieDocumentaryHe is the most performed contemporary composer in the world. And yet he rarely ventures out in public, prefers to keep quiet about his music, feels at home in the forests of Estonia and generates therewith - perhaps involuntarily - the impression of a recluse, which is attributed to him again and again: Arvo Part. In The Lost Paradise, we follow him over a period of one year in his native Estonia, to Japan and the Vatican. The documentary is framed by the stage production of Adam's Passion, a music theater piece based on the Biblical story of the fall of Adam featuring three key works by Arvo Part. The world-renowned director Robert Wilson has brought this work to the stage in a former submarine factory in Tallinn. Tracing their creative process, the film offers rare and personal insights into the worlds of two of the most fascinating personalities in the international arts and music scene.