All Films

Lighting

1981 • 6 min • Romania

Experimental film on 16mm by Ioan Pleș as part of Kinema Ikon.

Pony

1981 • 24 min • United States of America

Crimen a fondo

1981 • 53 min • Mexico

Mexican feature film

Burbujas; Rockola

1981 • 46 min • Mexico

Mexican feature film

Cómo quieres que sea

1981 • 60 min • Mexico

Mexican feature film

Aporia Series: Aporia I

1981 • 10 min

"It hurt my eyes, there was too much TV in it." - Stan Brakhage

Unwelcome Affection

1981 • 14 min

This Army training video was created in the 1980s by Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC to increase awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. The video showed five dramatized examples of inappropriate workplace behavior, followed by suggested questions after each segment to generate group discussion.

Hanafuda / Jasper Johns

1981 • 35 min

"HANAFUDA observes the artist, Jasper Johns, and the master Japanese silkscreen printers at Simca Print Artists, as they created three different images from Johns USUYUKI and CICADA series. For me, the camera was a pretext for an in-depth apprenticeship. The finished film recapitulates my process of learning, gleaned over time, as I observed Johns and the printers at work. What I wanted to know was how one generates a work of art and, for that matter, what is art, what work is involved, and how do ideas as opposed to physical labor drive the decision making process. The films became a meditation on art and craft, as well as on the dialectic of mind and body, concept and actual work." -Katy Martin.

Essay

1981 • 6 min • Soviet Union

A couple of America-worshipping cool cats cruise the streets with their pram full of forbidden fruit.

Speak Up, Andrew!

1981 • 18 min

Andrew's friends bully him into preparing a speech for Parents' Night at school.

Un homme est un homme

1981 • 45 min • Central African Republic

Documentary about Central African Republic before and during the reign of Jean-Bédel Bokassa. The first film to be made in the country.

Videograms

1981 • 14 min

1980-81, 13:27 min, b&w, sound Videograms is an ongoing series of text/image constructs or syntaxes using the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a device that enables Hill to sculpt electronic forms on the screen. Each "videogram" relates literally or conceptually to Hill's accompanying spoken text, which is visually translated into abstract shapes. Hill writes, "The vocabulary and precision of this tool allowed me to expand the notion of an 'electronic linguistic' through textual narrative blocks created specifically for the electronic vocabulary inherent in the Rutt/Etra device."

You Can See

1981 • 2 min

Life of the Artist

1981 • 38 min • Italy

A serial killer’s sequence of events of high aesthetic understanding, in a black-humor-filled tale resulting from Mauro Mingardi’s outlandish talent.

A Field Guide to Western Birds

1981 • 24 min

"these foolish truly chosen to confound the wise." D.S.

Erinnerungen - Zwei Frauen in Leipzig

1981 • 17 min • East Germany, Germany

A GDR documentary from the 1980s. Sachsenplatz in modern Leipzig: Waltraut Kosetzka, 61, and 55-year-old Inge Arnold are among the women who helped to rebuild the destroyed city after the collapse of the Third Reich. The film portrays the two women, documents their biographies, accompanies them in their everyday professional and private lives and visits their old places of work as rubble women. To emphasize the importance of their work, old footage of destroyed buildings is contrasted with new buildings. It is repeatedly emphasized that their work made a decisive contribution to improving housing conditions in Leipzig. To this day, the two working women are committed to maintaining their city.

Dangling by Their Mouths

1981 • 60 min • Canada

A 60 minute tape that tells in flash-form the story of a European critic and her relationship to three people; her lesbian lover who died of cancer, a Canadian / director in theatre, and a young performance artist who adopts her persona in a performance. The issue deals with sexual roles, love relationships and women's views of themselves in social/sexual relationships with women and men.

The Feathered Life of Rajasthan

1981 • 19 min

The film explores the Ghana bird sanctuary, the Ranthambhor game sanctuary and the desert regions of Bikaner and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan where a variety of birds from various parts of the world and India come. The lordly Siberian cranes fly in from Siberia after breaking their journey at Kabul. Out of the around two thousand surviving members of the species, one section spends the winter in China while another camp with their young ones for five long months at Bharatpur. Other birds in these areas include the Black Necked Stork, the Pintail, the Adjutant Stork, the Old World Spoonbill, the Egret, the White Ibis, the Darter, the Little Dabchik, the Cormorant and the Pheasant.

A Sheath-Knife

1981 • 14 min

Kauhava master craftsman Kustaa Lammi makes a traditional Finnish puukko knife.

A Soft Warrior

1981 • 11 min

Nina's first collaboration with her sister Tinka Menkes, the film documents, in a strange and beautiful way, a serious illness suffered by Tinka, and also expresses how art is a transformative response to life.

Lesbians (Gay Life)

1981 • 34 min

Gay women from different generations discuss their experiences in this revealing TV documentary.

Cinématon n°120 : Paul Sharits

1981 • 4 min • France

Salve

1981 • 14 min • United States of America

"There's a paradox at the center of Couzin's work, in that for all of the wariness of form and order her films express, they remain tightly organized, elegant formal studies. ... SALVE is her most paradoxical film and, I think, her richest. A young girl's discovery of 'the relationships between the quantities' – of geometry, volume, time, and numbers – is seen as an ineffably tragic development." – Dave Kehr Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.

It Happened One Day

1981 • 11 min • Egypt

Consequences of the collapse of a new realty.