Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling

Following the infamous incident when Richard Pryor, under the influence of cocaine, caught fire and almost died, Pryor exorcised his inner demons by playing the lead in this astonishing biopic, which he wrote, directed and produced himself. The backstage drama follows the controversial career of a young comedian – from his youth in a brothel in Ohio to the cocaine scene in Beverly Hills, and the addiction that nearly cost him his life.

Pryor says that he always had the feeling of being an outsider; that he always needed the instant self-confidence promised by drink and drugs. In this extremely personal film, he reveals himself at his most vulnerable – a film by an artist whose art became his life.

Garrett Bradley

This film was selected by American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley, subject of an exhibition in Eye. About her film selection she says:

There exists in this constellation of films, something that shaped me as I emerged in the world, a terrible and beautiful symmetry—a series of visions that reflect not only the abyss of human ignorance and the convulsions of violent power, but also the quiet, stubborn radiance of resistance.

These sacred dispatches from the edges of human consciousness, are a bulwark against the erasure of memory. When art is silenced, the past is sterilized, the present flattened into obedience, and the future, a barren repetition of sanctioned myths. A singular narrative emerges, one that dares not confront its own ugliness, nor the courage to imagine beyond it.

These works are not mere entertainment (although some were commissioned as such); they are fever-dreams of our shared condition, how we stagger beneath the weight of history and yet still raise our heads to dream. I return to them again and again as a reminder that though the world is often cruel, our collective capacity to endure, to fight, and to imagine something better is a defiance so profound it borders on the sublime.