Movies

Hammer & Tickle

2006-01-01 | 1h 29m | Comedy

For citizens of the Eastern Bloc, jokes were one of the only ways to vent displeasure with their regimes. Jokes were risky, though: at least 250,000 people were locked up under Stalin for telling jokes. Communist jokes poked fun at all aspects of life: shortages, the gulag, repression and communist language. Reagan had agents tasked with keeping him informed of soviet humour; he used them as a barometer of mood and as punchlines for speeches. Featuring animated and sketch-based visualisations of jokes, this film takes a chronological look at funny jokes and the serious efforts to contain them.

The Great Contemporary Art Bubble

2009-01-01 | 58m 42s | arts

On September 15th 2008, the day of the Lehman Brothers' collapse, a contemporary art auction at Southeby's made over £111 million. Critic and filmmaker Ben Lewis looks at the distorting effect of the commercial art market and how it functions - who’s buying the art, who’s making the art and who’s selling the art. Is work by Damien Hirst valuable because it is good or because it is expensive? Who regulates the art market? Lewis returns to Southeby's a year on, to find out what's changed and to examine the future of art as a commodity.