All Films

Filming Muybridge

1981 • 26 min • France

This film is the achievement of a process initiated by a fascination with the split movement images Eadweard Muybridge made in the 1870's and 80's. It has become a cinema fantasy on its own origins, an imaginary archeology in some ways.

In Motion

1981 • 13 min • United Kingdom

Three films interwoven into one. The first is a poem, displayed as a handwritten landscape observed from a train window. A matrix of phrases track three suns behind silhouettes of trees, allowing the eye to compose random fragments from the mass of shifting material. The second abstracts the surface the surface of a mountain stream through a series graphic, symmetrical camera traces. The final sequence is a breakneck volley of zooms down sunlit plantation avenues. ‘Lightning’ strikes, bird cries spread the alarm, as the image flashes and disintegrates into darkness.

Hamaca: The Quickie Version

1981 • 3 min • United States of America

The film grew out of the home movies made by my father and then by me. Led to one of the first optical printer films produced at The Florida Optical House, Miami, and shot by Albie Krieger. Combines Reg 8mm, 16mm and 35mm with most derived from 16mm. the sources and content are obvious, with the overall experience somewhat unresolved. tho the ending is explicit and direct. hence "the quickie version" title for a film that has been reworked in differing versions and number of projectors and screens. (Bruce Posner)

Juliette du côté des hommes

1981 • 60 min

A woman questions men. She tries to make them talk about themselves, some answer, others don't. In counterpoint: hunting, dancing, motorcycle riding. "I have always wanted to know more about men, to hear about their country, about "what it's like to be a man". Curiosity of a little girl, no doubt. But also a woman's desire, a desire to get closer and closer, until the impossible fusion. Juliette du côté des hommes is the film of this curiosity, of this desire. Men who please me tell me their story, tell me about their desires. And I, who listen to them and watch them, tell with these words and these images, my desire for them. Between a marathon and bikers, a hunting party and a card game, a waltz that sails and a tango that sways, there is masculinity that passes. There is - for me - the Other." (Claudine Bories)

Connecticut Papoose

1981 • 50 min

CONNECTICUT PAPOOSE is conceived a surrealist tract, with references to Lautremont, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton and to surrealist images of sleeping and dreaming. Throughout the tape, unrelated images and ideas are juxtaposed as they might be in a surrealist painting by Magritte. The voice over operates as a kind of stream of consciousness guide through the underworld labyrinth of the human mind (with all its vicissitudes). Lines from poets are combined with skewed observations on contemporary culture. Performances of musical and artistic content coccur within abnormal contexts. Images and sounds themselves also distorted and manipulated by electronic processes to produce a distancing and alienation from reality.

Peak

1981 • 2 min • United States of America

A very early example of fractal-generated terrain.

Desiring Men

1981 • 3 min

16mm experimental film by Dean Snider.

Anna

1981 • 40 min • Austria

Anna is a portrait of Anna Rheinsberg, and an attempt by Christanell to see herself in her friend: What do women of a certain age have in common, whatconstitutes femininity? One answer would be the objects in one’s life, and what one does with them.

Anagram

1981 • 35 min

The film takes place entirely in one room and is based on a series of six repetitive shots. These shots establish a schema, a set of expectations which are then undermined. The film favours image rather than sound, in contrast to most narrative film, and the sound, where it occurs, serves only to confound or displace any meaning that is established. There are people, activities, a location and a hint of story. The film, however, cannot be mentally reassembled into anything like what it hints at in its depiction of bits of mundane domestic activity. On the contrary, it intends to confound any such attempt at a coherent reconstruction, preferring instead to leave the viewer with a lingering sense of doubt. – N.H.

The Third Coast

1981 • 55 min • United States of America

This documentary seeks to capture the evolving character of Houston. The film pays special attention to the city’s rapid expansion—investigating not only what attracts so many people to the Bayou City but also its ongoing drawbacks, from a struggling mass transit system to alarming statistics about the use of deadly force by Houston police officers. Of particular note is footage of the premiere of French fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s Chloé collection at Neiman Marcus and an open casting call for Urban Cowboy (1980).

The Path of the Ogre

1981 • 25 min • Canada

Identifying himself intimately with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the director uses the camera to take hold of the actors, constructing fantasies that lead them to believe they are the victims in a film yet to be made. The young men, aged 19 to 26, speak from the heart about love and prostitution. Their search leads us into another world. Is this the world of John Wayne Gacy?

Adventures of the Avant-Garde

1981 • 11 min

Davidovich searches in vain for the meaning of "avant garde." The artist travels to Iowa City, where he conducts a series of "man on the street" interviews with artist Michael Smith, painter and critic Walter Robinson, University of Iowa professor of art history W.J. Tomasini, a security guard at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, an art school secretary, and strangers on the street.

Show Us, We Are Interested

1981 • 10 min • Soviet Union

An outline about the place of television in the life of an ordinary Soviet citizen and about the huge growth in demand for TV sets before the program dedicated to Laughter Day.

The Ladder of Senses

1981 • 26 min • Soviet Union

A Pushkin scholar Valentin Berestov analyzes the works of Aleksandr Pushkin. In particular, he proves that the “folk” songs in them were written by the poet himself.

Inconsequential Doggereal

1981 • 15 min • United States of America

Initially created as an editing exercise for his students at UCSD, Jenkins’ Inconsequential Doggereal mixes poetic narrative fragments of self-shot footage with moments ripped from the unending flow of TV news, advertising, and entertainment. The images and sounds of mainstream television are jammed, freeze-framed, looped, overlaid and rewound—clips of science documentaries, movies broadcast on TV, nightly news commentary on the minimum wage, and a 60 Minutes style interview with the actor Peter Sellers are all jumbled together. Jenkins interjects several original threads, which show pickup football games gone wrong, a young white couple doing chores and hanging out at home, and Jenkins himself laying on a green suburban yard as a lawnmower moves perilously close to his body.

Tempest

1981 • 5 min • United States of America

Abstract video art created in 1981. Music by Vibeke Sorensen and Walter Michael. Abstract video art created in 1981 at EUE Video in NYC.

Philip Whalen

1981 • 8 min • United States of America

This film portrays my friend Philip Whalen, a Zen Buddhist monk and poet, reading from his book The Art of Literature. There is a play of spotlight and shadow in this work which emphasizes the elusiveness of truth in poetry.

ベリザンナ

1981 • 3 min • Japan

Rare-tsu

1981 • 40 min • Japan

Mark

1981 • 5 min • Japan

An animated film by Cine Calligraphie.

Walden: A Short Legacy Film

1981 • 11 min

Walden combines delicate and brilliant images filmed on location around Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts with readings by poet, John D. Ogden, bringing to life the heart and soul of Thoreau's writings. Stunningly filmed by Rick Cardin at the height of New England's fall foliage season, Walden is one of the first films to capture the magical sense of place that inspired Thoreau. Through the selection of quotes, images and a soulful score by legendary musicians this film gem suggests the major themes of Thoreau's work: the reflection of the universal in the tiniest leaf or pebble, the connectedness of all things, the quest for eternal truths and the search for a way of living in harmony in the world.

Spectrum

1981 • 4 min • Canada

Experimental animation techniques give an impressionistic view of a day's weather in Atlantic Canada.

Paris non stop

1981 • 60 min

Slide projections, film clips and film extracts form this showcase of the capital, its monuments, its history, its celebrities and its curiosities.

Haunted Indiana

1981 • 19 min

A short anthology of folk stories about supernatural happenings in the state of Indiana, produced for WTTW Channel 4 Indianapolis.