All Films

In 1840 it took 5'30" to make a photograph.

Citations from love letters and poems written between Karl Marx and his fiancée Jenny von Westphalen during their teenage years are combined with images, paintings, and beautiful, atmospheric landscapes of places connected to Marx.

Produced to coincide with the 1984 Presidential Campaign, Perfect Leader is a cautionary tale that brings to life a prototypical politician, as packaged by Madison Avenue. With a driving soundtrack and bold visuals, Almy satirically presents this dynamic simulation of media politics as a fast-paced music clip. The narrator is a disembodied Big Brother, an Orwellian computer program who creates candidate images—dictator, evangelist, moderate—as models for a mass-marketed leader. The image of the potential president is overlaid with graphic symbols of multinational power: technology; economics; warfare. As a woman hysterically intones, "We've got to have a perfect leader," the bland, telegenic candidate is brought into two dimensions on the TV screen. Concise as a commercial, insistent as a pop song, Perfect Leader is Almy's most effective use of television techniques to critique the impact of the media on contemporary life.

Bosnian documentary art film.

A part of Earth's population are greedy and power-obsessed. They eat up and destroy everything. All of a sudden the planet Earth decides not to carry them anymore and they disappear in debris.

A madhouse. Everyone can do whatever they want. One crawls, and the other walks on the ceiling. The third one hangs from the lampshade. The fourth one pops out of the nightstand like a cuckoo clock . . . Orderlies catch one of the patients. Doctors consider it normal. He began to march in the impersonal formation of normal people.

Mexican feature film

It is a special day in an orphanage today. Its boys and girls put on beautiful national costumes in order to take part in the ceremony of lottery winners. These are children who have never had the chance to enjoy the life's wheel of fortune themselves, so they draw the lots of state lottery for other people.

Self Poured Traits is a tongue-in-cheek self-examination set to the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth.

Amid beautiful island scenery, a young Hawaiian searches the past for his cultural roots.

Four monkeys learn from people and try fishing in different ways.

Reflections on the moral values that develop in a person during school years. The author tells about his former school in Mazsalaca.

A moving and graphic portrait of the people of wartorn Beirut in their day-to-day struggle to survive in the rubble and despair. Filmed shortly after the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Chatila, the film gives a vivid picture of the plight of these people and of any people who are too poor to escape the ravages of war.

An experimental work about the Australian forests by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.

Mistress Hen has a lot of worries every day. She needs to feed the chickens, take them to kindergarten, clean, iron, and prepare dinner. But how to cook something without salt? Hen goes to the neighbor Goose to borrow salt, but she asks to do her a favour. A simple request triggers a whole cascade of favours that must be arranged to get...salt. The cartoon satirically mirrors the rampant barter and blat in the poor Soviet society of the late "stagnation" era.

La Cage seems to be divided into two parts: a homosexual writer visualises his fantasies and a collective joins what seems to be the story of an encounter between two men.

This performance took place in 1983 at the Art Dock on Center Street in Los Angeles. Like much of Jenkins's other work, it involved multiple performers, including Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi. Here Jenkins addresses social and geopolitical issues—specifically the "insensitivity of middle-class attitudes towards the Third World"—often using an invented language referred to as "doggereal." Jenkins confronts Americans' indifference to events outside their own country, particularly to crises and need in poorer nations.

This video documents Cake Walk, an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant's pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), at its second (downtown) location on Franklin Street. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance which developed in the mid-eighteenth century among enslaved African Americans as, among other things, a way to covertly ridicule slaveholders. The dancers in Cake Walk move amid Conwill's sculptures and paintings, one of Conwill's cosmograms painted on the floor beneath them.

The people of the Bikini Atoll were removed from their homelands as a result of American testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific. They now live on another island, dependent on American food and support. They can never go back to Bikini Atoll because it is poisoned beyond the possibility of habitation. This film is a poignant, impressive study of a people whose culture has been vanquished.

A boy in blue wanders along a riverside wearing a kettle, a raccoon piggy bank and an electric stand.

Documentary about the town of Walton-on-the-Naze, directed by Adam Curtis

Experimental short by Keiji Aiuchi.

A short film that deals with the strange and the supernatural. This film features a stop-motion newt, created and animated by Mr. Chorvinsky.