All Films

American Hotel

1983 • 13 min • Germany

Film by Telscher.

Antics of the Artists

1983 • 10 min

In and around the pool, an array of creatures move about. A scene of the famous novel "Seven Days at the Silbersteins" by Etienne Leroux to the music of Peter Klatzow, "Still-life with Moonbeams".

Waiting For the Big Bang

1983 • 44 min

Rabaul, New Britain is sitting on a time bomb. It’s hard for the Tolai inhabitants to cope with the constant threat of volcanic eruption as they wait and prepare for the next big one. For them, the town is their beloved madapai (home or place of origin) and cannot be abandoned. The last time the volcano under which Rabaul lies erupted was in 1937, when an estimated 500 people died and again in the early 1940s, with no loss of life. Waiting For the Big Bang includes historical footage showing the luxuriant lifestyle of German colonialists pre World War II and then the occupation of the Japanese army. It also shows contemporary scenes of the easygoing Tolai lifestyle, interspersed with full-blown evacuation exercises and scientific excursions into the craters of active volcanoes.

Eva and Maria

1983 • 29 min • Sweden

Invitation to Marilyn C

1983 • 12 min

This short drama is a humorous exploration of a woman regaining power as she challenges male supremacy in culture, the porn industry and film with clues for sweet dyke revenge.

Turnaround

1983 • 58 min • Australia

A spiritual journey, symbolized by the spiral, through images and sounds selected from the physical world over several years as the filmmaker moved between city and country and journeyed to the Center. Lee added some sounds and music to enhance the mood and sees the film as a mirror in which the image is distorted by his own consciousness.

Paracas

1983 • 19 min • Chile, United States of America

A three-dimensional animation of a pre Columbian textile. The Paracas textile, 300-100 BC, was found in a tomb in the south coast desert of Perú, and is a part of the collection of The Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Bus Stop

1983 • 7 min

An animated ride through an American urban landscape in the early 1980s.

Lontano, ancora

1983 • 13 min

Crossroads - Strayed

1983 • 23 min • Hong Kong

A young adolescent man (Tony Leung) gets into a scuffle with some local punks and things escalate into a crime. With his single mother ailing from a sickness, the young man contemplates turning himself in at the cost of leaving his mother.

She Said

1983 • 27 min • United Kingdom

She Said explores the theme of women and work, using the formal properties of film to reflect on the overlap between work and free time. The film begins with a series of old and contemporary photographs, cut to a rhythm, which echoes that of monotony. A fragmented dialogue creates a feeling of alienation and lack of control (often identified with the labour process), interrupting further sequences of live action and images. “Feeling strongly that women's work is continuous, I realised that the film work could only be seen after work or in moments of non-work which I hesitate to call leisure. With this in mind I tried to bring this contradiction to the surface within the film itself”' (Susan Stein)

Impetigo

1983 • 5 min

Impetigo is the story of passion and possession in a steamy nocturnal landscape. The title is a reference to the poem A Man All Grown Up Is Supposed To, by Terry Stokes. The characters: Zeke, an inhibited birdlike creature, Flake, a post-industrialist robot and Fish, a fish, live in a barren tract amidst surveillance and entrapment. Their main concerns are lust and what to do on weekends.

Peinture à l'eau

1983 • 21 min • France

Culture of Domination

1983 • 45 min

Ronald Reagan had been elected US president in 1981, and began the long unwinding of post-war progressive economic and social policy awaited by the American ruling class, but which had produced social welfare and full employment for the 50’s and into the 60’s when a combination of the cost of the Vietnam war and the Arab oil shock produced an economic crash. Initiating a program of de-regulation of industry, and of finance capital, and an aggressive anti-union assault, he began the process of offshoring, globalised production and finance, and the beginnings of the financialisation of capital and its oligarchisation that we now face. At the time we were unaware of the extent to which this would polarise and destroy and feudalise the society we were in but we could see the beginnings of the rollback and the destruction.

Pilgrim's Progress

1983 • 9 min • United States of America

A discourse on marketing through images. The "surface" is an abstract potpourri of polyrhythms, "named" items jumping into recognition here and there. I pulled magazine ink off the page with scotch tape and glued the tape strips onto film leader and rephotographed. It is a tale of coming to terms, of suspended disbeliefs.

Peer Pressure: Nobody Tells Me What To Do!

1983 • 23 min

A searing indictment of teenage peer pressure and petty crime in the late seventies.

50°45' N – 7°9' E

1983 • 4 min • Germany

Short film by SCHMELZDAHIN

Tighten the Drums: Self-Decoration Among the Enga

1983 • 46 min

In the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Enga people have developed the art of body decoration as a visual language. Using earth paints, tree oils, bird plumes, human hair, and a variety of plants, the Enga turn the body into a medium for an expressive and dramatic symbolism. This film shows the diverse forms of body art in both daily life and ritual in Enga village society.

Diaph limite 1,2 Posture d'exil

1983 • 9 min • France

shin-SHINPU

1983 • 4 min • Japan

Danki

1983 • 3 min • Japan

Veronica Four Rose

1983 • 48 min

Made with young lesbians aged between 16 and 23 from Newcastle, Liverpool and London, this warm and engaging film explores the ups and downs of being lesbian in a predominately heterosexual and homophobic society geared to wedding bells and boys. The young women interviewed speak openly about their experiences of coming out to friends and parents and how in many cases they were told it was only a ‘phase’ they would grow out of. ‘If you can go out with boys at 14 and that’s OK, why can’t you go out with someone of your own sex without it being a crush’ asks one of the young women.

Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us

1983 • 54 min • United States of America

Examines the aims and accomplishments of the New Jewel Movement and the reasons for the Fall 1983 U.S. military invasion. The film puts these events in perspective by tracing Grenada's early history, from the annihilation of the indigenous Carib Indians by the European colonial powers which vied for control of the region and then imported African slaves to grow cash crops for European export, to the evolution of modern Grenadian society, including the oppressive regime of Eric Gairy (1974-79).

Canal Cinema

1983 • 9 min • United States of America

"A unique kind of lyricism comes through and hovers over the images on the screen like the light that projects and contains them." –Ernie Gehr on Jim Jennings' films