Best movies & TV Shows like Icon: Music Through the Lens

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Icon: Music Through the Lens . If you liked Icon: Music Through the Lens then you may also like: The Naked Eye, Nitrate Kisses, Koyaanisqatsi, Blow-Up, Minamata and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

An eye-opening thrill ride that captures what it was like on both sides of the camera when the most recognizable images in history were taken featuring irreverent interviews with some of the most famous music photographers, musicians, gallerists, music journalists and social commentators.

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The Naked Eye

The Naked Eye is a 1956 American documentary film about the history of photography directed by Louis Clyde Stoumen. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Nitrate Kisses

Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.

Koyaanisqatsi

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

Blow-Up

A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.

Minamata

War photographer W. Eugene Smith travels back to Japan where he documents the devastating effect of mercury poisoning in coastal communities.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.

Finding Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier's photos were seemingly destined for obscurity, lost among the clutter of the countless objects she'd collected throughout her life. Instead these images have shaken the world of street photography and irrevocably changed the life of the man who brought them to the public eye. This film brings to life the interesting turns and travails of the improbable saga of John Maloof's discovery of Vivian Maier, unravelling this mysterious tale through her documentary films, photographs, odd collections and personal accounts from the people that knew her. What started as a blog to show her work quickly became a viral sensation in the photography world. Photos destined for the trash heap now line gallery exhibitions, a forthcoming book and this documentary film.

A Hard Day's Night

Capturing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in their electrifying element, 'A Hard Day's Night' is a wildly irreverent journey through this pastiche of a day in the life of The Beatles during 1964. The band have to use all their guile and wit to avoid the pursuing fans and press to reach their scheduled television performance, in spite of Paul's troublemaking grandfather and Ringo's arrest.

Life Itself

The surprising and entertaining life of renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert (1942-2013): his early days as a freewheeling bachelor and Pulitzer Prize winner, his famously contentious partnership with Gene Siskel, his life-altering marriage, and his brave and transcendent battle with cancer.

Shutter

A newly married couple discovers disturbing, ghostly images in photographs they develop after a tragic accident. Fearing the manifestations may be connected, they investigate and learn that some mysteries are better left unsolved.

Waste Land

An uplifting feature documentary highlighting the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Top-selling contemporary artist Vik Muniz takes us on an emotional journey from Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to the heights of international art stardom. Vik collaborates with the brilliant catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, true Shakespearean characters who live and work in the garbage quoting Machiavelli and showing us how to recycle ourselves.

The Linda McCartney Story

In a dramatization of her life, Linda Eastman, takes a job snapping pictures for Rolling Stone Magazine, despite the objections of her straight-laced father, Lee Eastman. As Linda rubs elbows with music royalty, she bumps into rock star Paul McCartney, and they soon fall in love. Although not only her father but also Paul's band mates disapprove of the romance, Linda and Paul wed while relations between the Beatles begin to disintegrate.

What Remains

At home at her Virginia farm, photographer Sally Mann reflects on the controversy surrounding her earlier collections while forging ahead with new work in this intimate portrait of an artist. Also offering insights into the photographer's career are Mann's husband and her now-grown offspring.

The Righteous Babes

The Righteous Babes shows how the self-affirmative music of young women is renewing the 90's feminism. In the film, audience can experience feminism not in the library but in the rock concert hall. The film shows interviews and performances. In addition, controversial feminists along with American and British women journalists share their views on pop culture.

Lucy Worsley's Royal Photo Album

Lucy Worsley tells the story of the royal photograph, showing how the royal family worked with generations of photographers to create images that reinvented the British monarchy.

Melody Gardot: The Accidental Musician

Jazz sensation Melody Gardot's grief-stricken, yet inspirational, journey to stardom is captured in this inspiring documentary. After being struck by a car in 2003, an accident that left her with life-altering injuries, Gardot began the emotional expedition towards healing. This special follows her path to recovery, intimately revealing how she used music as therapy to heal her spirit and ultimately impress the world. Featuring candid interviews and performances of her most famous songs from albums "Worrisome Heart" and "My One And Only Thrill".

Moment of Impact: Stories of the Pulitzer Prize Photographs

Moment of Impact: Stories of the Pulitzer Prize Photographs, hosted by Sam Waterston, tells the compelling stories behind some of the world's most memorable photographs. Returning to the scene of the action, each photographer describes, in a gripping first-hand account, how they took their prize-winning photographs. The moments they captured forged history and changed lives - including the photographers own. The stories of these unforgettable photographs' own. The stories of these unforgettable photographs - many of them shown here for the first time - are as compelling and long lasting as the images themselves.

Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas

An offbeat, irreverent musical documentary that tells the story of a group of Jewish songwriters, including Irving Berlin, Mel Tormé, Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, Gloria Shayne Baker and Johnny Marks, who wrote the soundtrack to Christianity’s most musical holiday. It’s an amazing tale of immigrant outsiders who became irreplaceable players in pop culture’s mainstream – a generation of songwriters who found in Christmas the perfect holiday in which to imagine a better world, and for at least one day a year, make us believe.

Dead Still

Upon the death of his great grandfather, Brandon Davis a wedding photographer inherits an antique camera famous for taking Victorian death photography. After photographing his subjects they start to die from horrible, bizarre deaths.

The Eighties

The third installment from executive producers Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog, following in the footsteps of critically-acclaimed series THE SIXTIES and THE SEVENTIES, tackles 10 years shaped by exceptionalism and excess. Like its predecessors, THE EIGHTIES intersperses rare archival newsreel footage, interviews, and comments by historians, journalists, politicians, celebrities and others, painting a perspective-rich picture of a vibrant decade. Episodes examine the age of Reagan, the AIDS crisis, the end of the Cold War, Wall Street corruption, the evolving TV and music scene, and everything in between.

How Art Made The World

Nigel Spivey reveals how the images which surround us today come from the ancient world. It's an epic journey spanning five continents and a hundred thousand years of history.

Fake or Fortune?

Journalist Fiona Bruce teams up with art expert Philip Mould to investigate the provenance or attribution of notable artworks.

Museum Secrets

Museum Secrets is a TV series on History Television in Canada and a website with videos and games

Frankie's House

In 1964 in Laos, young Tim Page discovers his vocation as a photo journalist and is given a job, a camera, and a trip to Vietnam. There, he learns the ropes, learns about the war first in Saigon, and then in country on patrol with troops. He and his colleagues, including the sons of Errol Flynn and John Steinbeck, capture the war in pictures, recover from their wounds, swap stories, battle censorship, and support each other between the explosions at the brothel run by Tranh Ki: Frankie's House.

Ways of Seeing

John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole host of assumptions concerning the nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.

The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

Christianity slowly emerged from being a persecuted minority to the state religion of the Roman Empire. This episode is a history of the ways believers grappled with a way to depict Jesus. Simple symbolic meaning developed into splendid art and churches.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt

Alastair Sooke tells the story of Ancient Egyptian art through 30 extraordinary masterpieces.

Rock Legends

Looking at these major artists, we discover the story of their lives and the impact they made on popular culture. Interviews with well known music critics, news archive and performance.

Dangerous Earth

Series showing how new camera technology is revealing the inner workings of the Earth's most spectacular natural wonders.

Abstract: The Art of Design

Step inside the minds of the most innovative designers in a variety of disciplines and learn how design impacts every aspect of life.

1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything

An immersive, deep-dive docuseries rich with archival footage and interviews that explores the musicians and soundtracks that shaped the culture and politics of 1971.

Inside the Met

The largest art museum in the Americas prepares to celebrate its 150th birthday with a treasure trove of landmark exhibitions. When COVID-19 strikes, the world shuts down and, for the first time in its history, the Met closes its doors. Then comes another crisis: in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, there are urgent demands for social justice.

VOIR

Film lovers examine the cinematic moments that thrilled, perplexed, challenged and forever changed them in this collection of visual essays.

American Masters

American Masters is a PBS television series which produces biographies on enduring writers, musicians, visual and performing artists, dramatists, filmmakers, and others who have left an indelible impression on the cultural landscape of the United States.

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