All Films

A Train Enters a Station

1988 • 10 min • Romania

“Cinema, Poetry, and Trains in Tîrgu Neamț” might serve as the subtitle for this film, which Copel Moscu composes in a deliberately atomised manner, capturing the rhythm of a small provincial town in late-1980s Romania: cinema as escapism, pouring rain à la George Bacovia, and a vague love story between a woman projectionist and a railwayman come one after the other over the course of this somewhat comical elegy, whose meanings do not achieve the poignant depths of Moscu’s other films.

The Public Voice

1988 • 11 min • Denmark

A short Surrealist animation from Denmark which begins with a zoom into a Paul Delvaux painting, then reverses the process by pulling back from a continually changing picture.

The Reservation

1988 • 8 min • Netherlands

Short dance film focusing on the Argentine Tango. The location is a wintery, deserted and neglected park. As they dance, two women dressed in close-fitting fur take possession of the park. (EYE filmmuseum)

Villa Rospigliosi

1988 • 4 min • United States of America

Directed by Jules Engel.

A Cold Draft

1988 • 28 min • United Kingdom

Shows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad. What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the Censors. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. It is the bunker-eye view.

Accident in Park Road

1988 • 6 min • United Kingdom

A road safety awareness video aimed at schoolchildren.

Mysteries of Mankind

1988 • 60 min • United States of America

Investigation about the origin of Man and his evolutionary process, taking into account the new techniques that allow to determine the age of fossils, bones and footprints, and reconstruct a face from its skull.

Cinema and Death

1988 • 46 min • Germany

“Why does cinema need death, when it can’t show it?” The filmmaker’s monologue and the discourse of images meet

The sound of his face

1988 • 5 min

A "filmed biography" of Kirk Douglas -- literally. Pages of a book -- the lines of text, and the tiny dots comprising the half-tone photographs -- create odd musical notes, which are edited into a pounding rhythm. This film examines the molecular fabric of Hollywood superficiality. Winner: Juror's Choice, SFAI Film Festival, 1988. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

The One With a Song

1988 • 24 min • Soviet Union

A rapid and whirling, musically arranged cascade of stunning visuals from the gone epoch. Rejected from the USSR Union of Composers, poet-songwriter Eugene Shikunov travels through towns and villages, offering businesses variations on the same 'production anthem' – songs meant to glorify the heroic daily labour of their employees. Rare instance of an absurd documentary-comedy.

Uncles & Aunts I

1988 • 3 min • Netherlands

Uncles and aunts and otherwise related people. Revealing snapshots of their lives and times. As long as they hold out, a series to be continued…

A Twenty-Year Survey, Newport Harbor Art Museum

1988 • 28 min

Accompanying video to the exhibition "Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey", Newport Harbor Art Museum, California, USA, 1988. Survey, interviews, etc.

Black Celebration

1988 • 17 min

This engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift. Cokes asks, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”

Black Hula

1988 • 5 min • Canada

A dirge-like hula song illustrates humanity's woes. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.

Didier Rousseau, sculptor, performance

1988 • 12 min • France

A sculptor carves and transforms himself.

What's Left is Wind

1988 • 4 min • United States of America

An elegy, this is a poetic film about the dissolution of memory - not as concrete recall of the past, but as a reconstruction and recontextualization of a fading image that is transformed through time.

Green

1988 • 37 min

Green is a world where ghosts live. Emerging from silent memory, they enter an image of reality, cool, crisp and static. Tromping forward, time unravels tracing to points of the past, conjuring the familiar, reliving events unresolved, revealing very little. Beauty is continually redefined, celebrating life and death in a plastic world haunted. It is a romantic suicide.

Horst

1988 • 20 min

We enter the life of Horst, and see the world of fashion photography evolve from the 1930s to the 1980s through his work and stories.

Capriccio for Baton and Pipe

1988 • 8 min • Soviet Union

Three arrogant wolves gradually stole the entire flock of sheep from a stupid shepherd.

How the Little Mouse Went to School

1988 • 8 min • Soviet Union

An educational cartoon about how useful it is to know the properties of forest plants. The scientist Raven tells the first-grader mouse about them and he, having listened, is late for his first lesson.

Tee-Hee

1988 • 2 min

Animator Thomas Stellmach's first cartoon, produced at the Academy of Art in Kassel.

Wonderful Apple

1988 • 10 min

Based on the fairy tale by E. Chestnyakov about the miracle apple.

Gathering Place

1988 • 59 min • Canada

Four Inuit families build a qaggiq, a large communal igloo, to mark the approach of spring with singing and games. A young man woos a girl but her parents are in disagreement over whether he shall get to marry her.

End Over End

1988 • 9 min

An attempt to respond to three things: 1) my daily life working, living in, and escaping from San Francisco, 2) montage, gesture, and technique in DEAD END DEAD END, a film by Daniel Barnett, and 3) cynicism that could remove one from constructive life. The montage of fine resonances and ecstatic rhythms suggests stories without elaborating a plot idea; this was the formal inspiration from Japanese haikai, or "linked poetry."