Pehlivan focuses on a three-day wrestling competition, an ancient tradition that dates back over a thousand years to the time of the Ottoman Empire, originating in the games the soldiers would play to entertain themselves in between battles. Maybe that's why there's more than a hint of homoeroticism in the way the wrestlers oil themselves up with grease, making sure to cover every inch of their bodies so that their opponents will be unable to get a grip. Pialat's closeups emphasize the men's muscular bodies jammed together and sliding off one another, posed in intimate, twisted arrangements, struggling desperately for a grip on each other's bodies. Arms are jammed down pants, one of the only places there's some potential for a handhold, and the whole thing is very suggestive and sensual, a form of intimate male contact that's sanctioned as a show of strength and masculinity.
JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families fr...
This short celebrates the 20th anniversary of MGM. Segments are shown from several early hits, then ...
Raphael: The Lord of the Arts is a documentary about the 15th century Italian Renaissance painter Ra...
BBC documentary about Franz Kafka played by GREEK TV in 1990.This documentary is one of the ten film...
It's 1974. Muhammad Ali is 32 and thought by many to be past his prime. George Foreman is ten years ...
Resorting on a vast archive material of newsreels, photographs, letters, family videos, fiction movi...
Examine the history of bluegrass music, from its origins to its eventual worldwide popularity, and h...
Stonehenge is an icon of prehistoric British culture, an enigma that has seduced archaeologists and ...
Using historically-accurate, battle-filled re-enactments and interviews with expert historians and n...
Filmmaker Irene Lusztig unearths a dark family secret in search of answers and reconciliation in her...
Michael Cockerell sheds new light on the tragi-comedy of the 1970s by focusing on some of its most c...
Buddhist monks open up about the joys and challenges of living out the precepts of the Buddha as a f...
Professor Saul David uses the BBC archive to chart the history of the world's most destructive war, ...
The impact of Marx on the 20th century has been all-pervasive and world-wide. This program looks at ...
Dr Janina Ramirez travels across glaciers and through the lava fields of Iceland to find out about o...
Examines the early 1980s Hong Kong filmmaking community. Tony Rayns interviews some of the new gener...