All Films

Beach Events

1984 • 8 min • Canada

This film completes a trilogy of landscape/poetry films, which include “Waterworx” (1982) and “Landfall” (1983), and was shot near the family home on the Northumberland Strait in Prince Edward Island. In writing the text for “Beach Events,” I wanted to challenge the cinema's dominant present tense by imitating primitive “event” poetry, referring superficially to action present on the screen, but gradually slipping out of synchronization with its referent. This practice, together with reading a kind of sub-conscious, internal monologue (also based on the film's events, but only those past and future), helps the viewer transcend the spectacle of the present, and be aware of a larger temporal universe. In this film it informs a dialectic of internal and external nature, temporal presence and absence, the conscious and sub-conscious. (RH)

The Firebird

1984 • 10 min • Soviet Union

Vasilisa the Beautiful is kidnapped by an evil force that has invaded her kingdom. Prince Ivan fails when he tries to save her and the kingdom. He decides to seek help from the mighty firebird.

Covert Action

1984 • 10 min • United States of America

Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to "disarm my movies." "I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive."

Who is Stronger?

1984 • 8 min • Soviet Union

How Alyosha rehabilitated a rude man.

The Naked Killer

1984 • 43 min • Italy

It is known that Muybridge was at the same time a great photographer and a killer, executioner of his wife’s lover and that into his own station physiologique (to use Marey’s term for his own working laboratory), it seems, not a single black man ever entered. Female servants, the unemployed, artists’ models supplied by the State, musclemen, the infirm and prostitutes were all undressed there. They all ran, people as well as animals under the sun of Palo Alto. In this P. T. Barnum style atmosphere, a melancholy Noah’s Ark, Muybridge himself would appear as a laborer nude.

Ver-O-Peso

1984 • 14 min • Brazil

Belém, northern Brazil; a tourist and a beggar meet in Ver-O-Peso market, a culturally rich site in Amazon.

On Poetry

1984 • 12 min • Italy

An essay on contemporary Italian poetry with the works of Dario Bellezza and Amelia Rosselli.

Hong Kong Topography: Näherungen

1984 • 12 min • Germany, Hong Kong

Trying to approach the city – but constant rejection

Die Geschichte vom Kalif Storch

1984 • 28 min • East Germany

Caliph Harun al-Rashid was turned into a stork by a power-greedy rival. Only with the help of his wise vizier and a beautiful princess is he able to escape the spell. Based on a fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff.

Allers-Venues

1984 • 13 min • France

A month in the country. In summer, a group of friends rent a house in southern France. People come and go, making their way through chickens, dogs and cats. Playful sounds and a wacky collage of music make up the soundtrack.

Fitness and Me: What Is Fitness Exercise?

1984 • 11 min • United States of America

Created for Walt Disney Educational by Sunwest Production and distributed to Schools

Italie aller retour

1984 • 33 min • France

Clotilde meets Richard whom she has not seen for a few years and who has been through a divorce. He is taking his two sons to Italy. He suggeests she join them with her own son in a house they have taken by the sea. Both this reunion and the holiday prove a disappointment,

Romeo and Juliet

1984 • 10 min • Yugoslavia

A fanciful retelling of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".

Tortured Dust Part 4

1984 • 25 min • United States of America

While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling." Coming upon the following passage in her book, he found renewed energy to continue and complete the work: "Why should she give birth, though she had worked in a pottery, to an urn, to a stone angel, to the face of a cracked sundial? Why should she be, she screamed, this common clay, this tortured dust?" From "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling" by Marguerite Young... to whom this film is gratefully dedicated.

Delay Exposure

1984 • 3 min • Japan

"Set to a soundtrack of pulsing synth bleats, Delay Exposure rhythmically deploys a low-tech, in-camera tricks—including lens-flares, whip-pans, and rapid, strobing exposure shifts—to builds an affective sense of place and architecture." - filmlinc.org

Outside Lives

1984 • 60 min

Journey into the world of transvestites and transsexuals from the South of Italy who prostitute themselves on the sidewalks of Turin where they live in crumbling walkways. The result of a two and a half years research, the film consists of a continuous, almost imperceptible transition from documentary to fiction and vice versa, characterized by respect and delicacy.

At Maxwell Street

1984 • 39 min • United States of America

A portrait of the Chicago street market.

"Sorry/Hear Us"

1984 • 8 min • United States of America

"A film about transformations. It was made with students from one of my seminars. We attempt to deconstruct a poem’s language by playing it backwards until some words emerge from the backward text. The students then created film images that illustrate this new text. Then they create new sounds that relate to those images. It was a way to turn language into a means to generate a film free from the restrictions of its most immediate intention." — Larry Gottheim

Chill point out period

1984 • 20 min • Japan

So, what exactly were we doing with this work? To put it simply, we tried to see if we could do something similar to musical improvisation in film.In musical improvisation, some performers play instruments, others voice, and sometimes even dancers join in, creating a unique expression through the collaboration of these expressive acts, which could be described as a kind of friendly competition on the spot.In film, there was a "convention" to construct a work based on a "blueprint" called a concept, whether it was a scenario for a commercial film or an experimental film.This film is an attempt to break away from that style, and together with the staff and actors with whom I have worked on several other films, I explored a free jazz-like approach to making a film through a session.I didn't want to keep shooting indefinitely, so I decided to shoot from March 1st to March 10th, 1984.

Graffiti Hall of Fame

1984 • 9 min

Documenting Graffiti culture in a basketball court in the Bronx. The filmmaker was accompanied by Martin Wong who said, "bring your camera". The Graffiti Hall of Fame is the result.

Tremors

1984 • 13 min

Tall buildings and cars are shot through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. The camera is moving in the slick of space. Shapes vibrate selectively out of the image; others at different points in space and in turn, vibrate or flash as vibrations also vary in rhythms and intensity. The Kinemacolor process was use in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, alternating red and green filters. This film, while already in color, takes advantage of many of the particularities of the system.

Ultraman Kids: The Pleasant Friends of Planet M7.8

1984 • 24 min

Ultraman Kids was a 1984 television special aired in Japan featuring several Ultraman characters as children. The short was successful, as several others were produced. The shows taught life lessons and were comedic in tone. A sequel series was released in 1992, and lasted for 26 episodes. The second show was more adventure oriented and featured more characters, though mainly focusing on Ultraman, Ultraseven, Ultraman Taro, Pigmon, Alien Baltan, Alien Guts, and a new character named Piko (Not to be confused with Hanuman's human host) based upon Yullian.

Rushlight (Here Today Gone Tomorrow)

1984 • 54 min

Here Today Gone Tomorrow (aka Rushlight) was made from a single, three minute roll of Super 8 footage shot over one day of stop/start driving through the Maramures folk district of Romania. I reworked this footage via JK Optical Printer using a larger than normal film gate designed (by myself) to allow the re-filming and hence layering of frame clusters as well as single frames. This project explores an intersection between transition and memory (passing time, times past, arrested in time, what lies ahead) through looping, stretching, and layering of images filmed originally while driving through this unique preserve of Romanian culture. A silent, visual sketchbook of sorts, this work explores the repetitive, cyclical structuring of this Super 8 footage developed over several years of working with a JK Printer. The result is an open and meditative work around the subject of “passage.”

Crowdog

1984 • 7 min • United States of America

This journal entry of a film describes a young artist in the midst of over two years of shoe-free peregrinations, with a spare, mesmerizing narration that reflects a landscape ranging from the slimy underbelly of dirty Chicago to a hitchhiker’s perch in the back of a dusty pickup truck.