All Films

The historical musical made in the Inca citadel in 1981 with texts by Pablo Neruda and music of The Jaivas. Special Guest: Mario Vargas Llosa in the presentation.

Urge to Build is a 1981 American short documentary film directed by Roland Hallé about individuals building their own homes. They share the experience and the different phases of construction, providing a background for more human issues: stress, confidence, and control of one's own life. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Tuning In – A Film about Karlheinz Stockhausen was produced for the BBC in 1981. Directed by Robin Maconie, who authored The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, this documentary is a lively and informative introduction to the work and process of a man who shook music and consciousness up.

This short animated film looks at the last of the great dinosaurs to stalk the central plains of North America. Lifelike models of ornithomimus, edmontosaur, and triceratops recreate the late Cretaceous period, offering a view of how our world may have looked 64,000,000 years ago.

In the north of Egypt, communities living near the salty lakes of El Borrolos during a treacherous drought.

Karl Kels' first film is a playful short piece comprised of shots of haystacks in the countryside. Quick repetitions of frames and the dance-like rhythm in which the frames are combined create an illusion of movement within the single shot in which no actual movement takes place, save for one passing car. The combination of different images in short sequences forces a new reality upon the haystacks, making them move in every possible direction. Short as it is, this debut already puts its finger upon some of the characteristics that have remained of great importance throughout Kels' entire work so far: the inseparable world of the single frame and time as an artistic controlling device.

An attempt to confuse the relationship between the film's material surface and the images recorded on it. As a man continues to walk in circle, where three scratches are made on the film. Xenogenese is a biological term meaning heterogenesis.

Vivienne Dick's first film after the New York series takes her back to her native Ireland. Using Super-8 film as a parody of the 'travelogue' or home-movie style film, Dick takes a expatriate, tourist look at her homeland. The narrative follows Margaret Ann Irinsky as the American tourist trekking from a Dublin populated by Hare Krishnas and rock music, to the horse-drawn carriages in the west of Ireland and the kissing of the Blarney stone. The quaint perception of Ireland and the Americanization of the native culture are contrasted with interviews from sectarian prisoners and footage of political marches. As in all her work, Dick uses a mixture of verité shots which capture the essence of the locality and intersperses them with images which have a totally different feel. This method is used to highlight issues in a subtle way wherein the camera takes an active rather than a voyeuristic role.

Bringing offerings of rice, flowers, and woven coconut leaves, clients visit Jero in her household shrine to determine the cause of their son's death. Jero lights an incense brazier, sprinkles holy water, and recites mantras as preliminaries to trance. Several ancestors and finally the young son speak through her voice, revealing the nature of his premature death (witchcraft) and his wishes for cremation. In contrast to other films about Balinese trance which focus on spectacular, community performances, this film provides an intimate view of a fascinating process of communication between Jero, the spirits, and her clients who are at one point moved to tears. (der.org)

1981 German super 8 short work

This symbolic journey evokes the personal creative wandering of the Vasulkas. The landscape, shot from a car window while driving in the Santa Fe area, is gradually transformed with more and more complicated imagery techniques.

In 1981, anthropologist Linda Connor and filmmakers Tim and Patsy Asch returned to Bali with video cassette recordings of A Balinese Trance Seance. The resulting film presents some of her reactions to Connor as she watched and listened to herself for the first time. Jero had a unique opportunity to spontaneously and consciously react to and reflect upon the experience of possession. Her comments provide insight into how she feels while possessed, her understanding of sorcery, and her humility in the presence of the supernatural world. More mundane thoughts are revealed as well, for example the importance of the fine appearance of her house. Jero On Jero could most fruitfully be used as a companion to A Balinese Trance Seance, which would be shown first and followed by a discussion, before screening Jero Tapakan's own response.

Female punks have fun boozing, smoking and talking in this fascinating film by London lifestyle chronicler Captain Zip.

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. But the darkness is not ‘night,’ or even simply some more abstract absence of light, but a more profound vacuum: it represents a world stripped of all the coordinates of the known, an unmeasurable absence. […] These lushly sensual, pleasurable-to-view films are also terrifying: their unpredictability, continually enacting new dramas of surprise, alternatively swamps the viewer in light and leaves him adrift in darkness.”

How friends saved a green meadow from drought.

It’s boring to play alone, and the “big ones” don’t want to play with you. But, fortunately, then everyone understands that it’s really fun to play with kids.

In the distant primitive world, where our ancestors lived - primitive people, amazing flowers bloomed, amazing animals walked and these events take place. Two little primitive people, two children, with all their curiosity explore the new world, observing the wild chickens that inhabit it, rhinoceroses with trees instead of horns and many other equally interesting and amazing creatures. One day, while playing hide and seek, they meet a cute puppy on their way, who will become their faithful friend and brave defender.

Seventy seconds of furiously energetic filmmaking in which all of the possible pauses in visual and aural activity have been removed. What is left when all of the fat has been trimmed? Monkeys with diamond studded collars, killer fish, and a parade of incongruous images, statements, questions, and answers guided to an exciting climax by a storefront dummy who takes over the interviewing chores midway through the film.

A visually stunning all-Hungarian production of Bartok's only opera, memorably led by Sir Georg Solti, one of the composer's greatest interpreters. The great Hungarian maestro, Sir Georg Solti, conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a film version of one of the great Hungarian masterpieces of the 20th century. An all-Hungarian cast, led by the celebrated soprano Sylvia Sass as Judith.

Film by Telscher.

The film is a superimposition of 6 to 8 takes. In each take, a horizontal piece of white paper was moved around in front of the camera by hand.

Hors Titre I (Off-Title I) is a hermetic movie deliberately mysterious. Figure interpreted by Stuart Sherman shines in the first part of the film by his anonymity. The man drowned in the crowd, activity, all this urban life that is foreign to him. It expresses nothing, does nothing, to the point of appearing to blur the image. In the second part, it works. Always very mysteriously. The viewer built himself a sense of all these actions cut by the film. Whatever it is, its activity is internalized: slide analysis, reading, writing. The outlines of this figure then draw, and blend back into the urban landscape, this time in the open. The character became somebody through a symbolic initiation: nighter? read de Sade? photographic activity? maybe three at a time, perhaps in a dream. The key is in becoming.

Varela's reflections on home and place before embarking on one of his major life changes, moving from El Paso to San Francisco.

Documentation of a 3-projector super-8 film performance. (one projector is hand-held by the filmmaker and moves during performance) Government Property acknowledges a film's familiar function to present the illusion of another time and space while, at the same time, presenting elements which allow the viewer to also experience an event in the present tense. The latter is suggested by including elements of the projection experience such as interchanging images amongst the projectors, shadows, and varying the size and position of the hand-held projected image. The title originated from the words "government property" which are printed on each sheet of toilet paper in the British Museum. The film images, shot between 1978 and 1981, include British newspaper accounts of the Queen of England, media news coverage of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, and other cultural and political monuments such as Stonehenge, the Salisbury (England) train station; the Trans-Canadian Railroad,