All Films

David und Goliath

1981 • 6 min • East Germany, Germany

The theme of "David and Goliath" is varied through colors, structures and shades in a kind of workshop film. Collage-like graphic elements, materials and different fabrics are used to allow form, color and structure to be experienced in their correspondence to each other and to movement and music.

Le verre n'est jamais si bleu qu'à sa brisure

1981 • 8 min

A film in blue, with a few red moments. It is an attempt to paint with the camera, to try to approach, through the associations/oppositions of objects, elements, colors, a certain tactility assumed by the visual. The Super-8 camera, often hand-held like a pencil or a brush, produces a sum of sketches that the montage has tried to articulate. (The rhythmic component of this one made me give up any use of sound). —Eric Lanz

Time Zone

1981 • 19 min

TIME ZONE is a tapestry of colliding and interfering sounds, photographs and clips, for the most part recorded on the Alaska and TransCanada Highways between the Rockies and the Pacific. From one time zone to another, it explores the relations and combinative impact of time, space, form and content.

Conduit Pages

1981 • 60 min • Soviet Union

Play based on Lev Kassil's story "Conduit and Shvambrania".

About the Cat, About Vasya and Hunting Catfusion

1981 • 9 min • Soviet Union

Nothing with Me When I Die, Those Who Owe Me I'll Collect in Hell

1981 • 20 min • Brazil

An exercise in gentle voyeurism revealing glimpses of the secret side of Salvador, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Bahia, filming a derelict prostitution zone.

It's the Same World

1981 • 20 min • United States of America

It's the Same World is a 1980 American short documentary film produced by Dick Young. Shot on location in various parts of the world, it depicts children in the Philippines who can neither hear nor speak, a brain-damaged child in India, an Ethiopian cripple learning a trade so that he can support his family with dignity, and a Mexican polio victim, whose mother uses therapy to help her daughter walk. Also featured is Terry Fox, the Canadian youth who lost his right leg to cancer and yet set out to run across Canada. The world of the disabled is not a special world, but the same world in which we all live. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Home on the Rails

1981 • 10 min • Netherlands

A couple lives in a house situated on the railway tracks. They lead a peaceful domestic life, despite the periodic interruptions of the train passing through their living room; but when the husband - a gold prospector - falls down on his luck, the train comes to assume a more ominous significance.

Jacobs' Ladder

1981 • 4 min

All is inevitably one. With the golden mean as seed, the fruit is 10 sided. Not "?'s", but "?s'" in homage to Ken, who almost offhandedly wished for wheels within wheels. Breathtaking, mesmerizing, deeply satisfying.

Bluebeard's Castle

1981 • 56 min

The great Georg Solti conducts a spectacular studio production of this masterpiece of 20th century opera. Two internationally celebrated Hungarian opera stars perform Bartók's darkly psychological parable with searing dramatic intensity.

MM 51 Nosferatu

1981 • 10 min

MM51 does more than mark time, it mics it. Film within film as Murnau's silent "Nosferatu" leads an accompanist by the hand, and whose feet are quite literally tied to time. A tug of war between the vertical and the horizontal.

Barabaniada

1981 • 15 min • Soviet Union

A man meets a drum that falls in love with him.

Citizens Banned

1981 • 12 min

The last in Phil Munnoch aka Captain Zip's series of 8mm portraits of the London punk scene captures the movement in decline - and Chelsea's last gasp as a bohemian enclave. Zip's extended family of young punks - including Katie Thunder and Wobble - are still a close-knit bunch, defiantly living it up on the Kings Road. But by 1981 they were a tourist attraction, posing for photos with curious straights for a few quid.

A Trojan House

1981 • 25 min • United States of America

A house of trick cards, the woman as house. "A marvelous smorgasbord of images." – Edgar Daniels "Architectural structures become the structures of relationships, establishing the windows of communication (between parents and children, between lovers) while preserving a sense of enclosure, isolation." – Dave Kehr

Jetzt, nach so viel’ Jahren

1981 • 60 min

Documentary about a small German village and its inhabitants four decades after the last remaining jewish inhabitants were chased away or put into concentration camps. Interviews with the people of the village about the past as well as with the exiled jewish community, now living in New York.

Male Sexuality

1981 • 37 min

Gay men discuss sexuality, masculinity and relationships in a documentary filmed just before the outbreak of AIDS.

The Quick Clay Landslide at Rissa

1981 • 21 min • Norway

On the 29th of April 1978, a quick clay landslide devastated large areas of the rural district of Rissa. One person died whilst 13 farms; 2 homes; a cabin and a community centre were taken by the clay masses. The Rissa landslide was caught on 8 mm cinefilm by two film amateurs. This is still used actively in avalanche preventative and educational work.

Trim Subdivisions

1981 • 5 min

Experimental film by Bob Snyder, 1981.

Adam Powers

1981 • 2 min • United States of America

A computer-animated juggler.

The Three Worlds of Bali

1981 • 59 min

On the Indonesian island of Bali, the arts permeate almost every aspect of daily life. Gamelan music, wayang (shadow puppet) theater, dance, and elaborately constructed offerings of foods and flowers all represent attempts to please the gods and placate demons. In Balinese cosmology, demons are thought to dwell in the watery underworld, gods in the upper world, and human beings in the middle realm between the two. Much of human effort is directed toward maintaining the proper balance between these worlds, and between the forces of growth and decay.

The Steel Hammer Out There On the Grass

1981 • 41 min • Austria

On March 28th 1981, 10.000 people take to the streets. The city of Judenburg demonstrates for the preservation of their steel plant. The demonstration is a start, a late attempt to avert the threat of job loss. The film shows how the international steel crisis affects Austria.

System

1981 • 27 min • Poland

An adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, transposed to a contemporary setting. A couple visits a remote asylum where the woman knows the staff, only to discover that the institution is overrun and the lines between doctors and patients have collapsed.

Noblesse Oblige

1981 • 25 min

The style is relatively unchanged, but the images--press conferences, news events, disasters--convey his vision of the world in a new, direct, political fashion. Featuring startling footage of the City Hall riots after Councilman Dan White received a light prison sentence for slaying San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Noblesse Oblige opens a new chapter on Sonbert's career. --David Ehrenstein, LA Reader. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Estate Project for Artists with AIDS in 1998.

Rockaby

1981 • 57 min • United States of America

A one-woman play written by Samuel Beckett at the request of Daniel Labeille. The piece was produced by Labeille on behalf of the State University of New York's Programs in the Arts for a festival and symposium in commemoration of Beckett's 75th birthday (Wikipedia). A self-reflective drama of a figure, W, rocking "to and fro" in her dead mother's rocking chair wearing her mother's sequined funereal garment. With the aid of her pre-recorded voice, W recounts the different phases of a single memory in a bid to connect with "another creature like herself" before rocking herself into an eternal sleep.