All Films

The Comsat Angels Live 12-12-1981

1981 • 58 min • Germany

The Comsat Angels - the legendary post-punk band from Sheffield, England, live recording from Mensa Wilhelmstrausse, Tuebingen, West Germany, on December 12, 1981. They were initially active from 1978 to 1995 with basically this line-up. Named after the J. G. Ballard short story. They debuted in 1979 with the "Red Planet" three-track single. This release attracted Polydor A&R man Frank Neilson and the band signed a three-album recording contract. These three albums - "Waiting for a Miracle" (1980), which included the single "Independence Day", probably their best known song, "Sleep No More" (1981) and "Fiction" (1982) - are regarded by some as their best, but only sold modestly.

Street and Feet

1981 • 3 min

An early "walking" performance shot on super-8 in 1981.

The first day of appointment

1981 • 39 min • Albania

Bardha works in an agricultural cooperative while Gjika works as an engineer in a mine. Due to their work, they get promoted to work in the ministry departments.

Unfaithful Portrait

1981 • 8 min • Poland

Five Billion Years

1981 • 7 min

This superbly animated science film traces the evolution of North America from the Earth's geophysical beginnings, through the genesis of the first living organisms, right up to the arrival of humans. Radiant colours and smooth-flowing animation evoke sizzling lava rivers, oceans bursting with life, and freezing ice ages. The film provides an excellent view of the time frame within which these remarkable events took place and highlights the fact that, relatively speaking, we are newcomers to Planet Earth.

The Mirage

1981 • 38 min • Sweden

A film about South American immigrants who try to live in Sweden without a job.

The Vacation Resort

1981 • 12 min • Sweden

One day at a holiday home for the disabled in Hammerdal, Jämtland, depicted in clay animation and with authentic sound from the home that the film tells about. Various episodes show everyday events and relationships between the old ones who have lent their voices and characters to the movie figures. The film shows how an ordinary day looks like meals, mail delivery, card games and visits to the Salvation Army. In the end, the real people compare and comment on their characters.

Closer Outside

1981 • 9 min

The precisions and idiosyncrasies of movement associated with domestic activities are closely stared at, or as it sometimes happens, watched carefully through the peripheral vision. This while rhyming, is done in alternance, thus creating sudden rushes in the mind while spaces collapse. Also, light burns wedges in this film, recalling…

Plexi Radar

1981 • 7 min • United States of America

Plexi Radar is the act of filming a gyrating motion of a circular plexiglas sculpture, which is then looped by a computer. The image of the sculpture alternately divide in between some hypnotic shots in which subconscious impose the illusion of a constant change of frame.

The Diamon'd

1981 • 1 min • France

Terre d'ombre

1981 • 14 min • France

Mémoires Filmiques

1981 • 10 min • France

A homage to the 80s experimental cinema. A poetic play manifesto about this form of expression that at the moment had a huge development.

Mobiles

1981 • 15 min • France

Mobiles works with regulated frame movements becoming increasingly more unpredictable : a controllable, closed space, in which more random and unrestrained movement are distributed. This device allows forms to be deployed by the movement, but is still untapped by narrative film: contracting and leaking spaces, crushed signs, decomposition of movements by other movements, dripping and corpuscular choreography. Mobiles is the result of a continuous tension between abstraction and reality. The same goes for the relationship between sound and image, which echo one another.

On Your Own

1981 • 2 min

Into my hands fell a 20-minute exhortation to find the right job after high school. Struck by its fierce redundancy, I undertook a distillation, editing the optical track, aiming for conversational cadence, choosing image only when silent. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Memories of Spring in Liao Ning

1981 • 40 min • France

Experimental diary shot in 1978-1979 when Alain Mazars was a volunteer teacher in China, 2 years after Mao's death. We see a few pictures, by candlelight, and they flash before our eyes quicker and quicker, before becoming mental images, an entanglement of memories coming from a mind that was asleep until then.

What Mary Jo Shared

1981 • 13 min • United States of America

A short film for school kids about the importance of sharing.

Racing

1981 • 2 min • United States of America

Conversations with Willard Van Dyke

1981 • 60 min

In 1935 photographer Willard Van Dyke moved to New York with the belief that films "could change the world" and began a new career as a filmmaker. His name soon became synonymous with social documentary in the U.S. His images of cottonfields, steelmills and industrial towns, and his portraits of unemployed factory workers and their families, provide an invaluable chronicle of those years and have become timeless examples of cinematic art. A candid portrait of a distinguished and outspoken man, this film includes conversations with colleagues Ralph Steiner, Joris Ivens and Donald Richie; footage of Edward Weston, his close friend and mentor; and many excerpts. It explores the dilemma of anyone with a social conscience who must face the harsh realities of earning a living while retaining their integrity. And it reveals a man in his seventies still determined to do good creative work.

Chutes de Gong

1981 • 7 min • France

The Madonna of Vilnius

1981 • 9 min

A story about a version that Madonna of the Gate of Dawn is an artistic expression of the drama that Barbora Radvilaitė experienced.

Chutes de Foire du Trône

1981 • 20 min • France

Outtakes from the movie Foire du Trône.

Musikalische Arabesken: Dixie-Linien

1981 • 4 min • East Germany, Germany

Second of four "musical arabesks".

Symptomatic Syntax

1981 • 28 min

Symptomatic Syntax is a recreation of an ecological environment in which natural forms — leaves, flower petals, butterfly wings — form an ever-changing, visually compelling series of compositions. Juxtaposed with these organic forms is a series of texts that examine time, logic, and the dichotomy between the mental and the physical. This complex fusion of the sensual and the cerebral questions the understanding of time and natural progression.

Dinosaurs: Puzzles from the Past

1981 • 21 min • Canada, United States of America

Join two youngsters and their teacher as they discover clues to Dinosaurs: Puzzles from the Past. Putting dinosaurs in perspective is their first task. They follow a time line back from the Age of Man to the era of dinosaurs. Animation introduces a variety of dinosaurs and their environment. Students see fossilized dinosaur bones uncovered by excavators at Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. They also visit a paleontologist in his lab and see a comparison of bones from two different dinosaurs. At a museum in Ottawa the two youngsters see a full-scale reconstructed tyrannosaur skeleton and identify it as a meat-eater by its feet and teeth.