All Films

A Esperança é um Animal Nômade

1981 • 9 min • Brazil

Torro. Torro. Torro!

1981 • 7 min

A lawnmower goes on a rampage.

Grand Mal

1981 • 23 min

"Oursler’s thematic concerns betray classic Freudian anxieties about sex and death. In Grand Mal, the hero takes a convoluted odyssey through a landscape of disturbing experiences. The video’s free association includes, "digressions about the difference between salt and sugar and a version of the creation myth that is both banal and terrifying." — Christine Tamblyn, “Art Notes,” Scan (November/December 1981)

8 and 3/4

1981 • 7 min • Poland

An anthology of 8 and ¾ macabre and absurd jokes. Witty souls of the dead, genocidal animals, lethal sport performances, medical appointments. Each life ends with death, though in different ways.

Jasper Carrott: Beat The Carrott

1981 • 60 min

Jasper Carrott has long been one of this country’s most well-loved comedians and this ITV special from 1981 shows him on top form. Recorded live at the London Palladium, the “Guv’nor of Conversational Stand-Up” showcases some of his classic routines from his 70s and 80s stage shows. In this live set he lampoons the BBC, Crossroads, his early gigging days in flea-pit theatres and even his audience!

Ted Bakes One

1981 • 1 min • United States of America

A chicken runs around screaming, trying to lay an egg.

Max Roach: Live at Blues Alley

1981 • 58 min • United States of America

This 1981 live show at Washington DC's famous Blues Alley features drummer Max Roach and his band.

胸さわぎの放課後

1981 • 55 min • Japan

Dame Janet Baker Sings

1981 • 45 min

Mary Marquis introduces a concert recorded in the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh in 1981 with Dame Janet Baker. She performs Mendelssohn's concert aria Infelice and Handel's dramatic solo cantata Lucrezia with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The Little Players

1981 • 28 min • United States of America

We visit a magical repertory company with an absolutely unique group of five actors you’ve never seen before. Uniquely talented, they present a fresh perspective into the worlds of music, literature, and drama. Through the eyes of the actors, the works of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and others known and unknown are revealed in a stunning new perspective. Brimming full of wit and humor, a visit to the Little Players is guaranteed to bring a well-needed dose of love, humor, and delight.

Opa sein Berlin

1981 • 14 min • Germany

Rare documentary footage from around 1900 depicts the mood of life in Berlin at the turn of the century.

Hobo

1981 • 28 min

Documentary on hobo culture in the United States at the turn of the 1980s.

Carrott Del Sol

1981 • 50 min

Jasper Carrott stars as Sago, on holiday in Spain with his two friends Wayne and Kevin. After nearly missing their plane, Sago ends up losing all of the trio's money in a game of backgammon, and enters them into a talent contest to try to win some back. They are the stereotypical British tourist in the sun: uncouth, rowdy, obnoxious, and more often than not, drunk!

Fröken Julie

1981 • 47 min • Sweden

Birgit Cullberg's 1950 dance adaptation of Miss Julie was the breakthrough for modern dance in Sweden. 30 years later one of her sons plays the role of Jean in this adaptation for TV.

Old Man and Wind

1981 • 47 min • Soviet Union

The films is a memoir of an old man - a garbage truck driver. The patterns is about his past military life, from which to him seems to revert his dead son.

Fourteen's Good, Eighteen's Better

1981 • 60 min • Australia

Profile on three young Adelaide women. Diana, Kerry and Josie are now 18 years old, and continue to have open and frank discussions about their lives.

Focus

1981 • 2 min • Soviet Union

A picturesque study of flowers.

Casimiro, O Poeta

1981 • 11 min • Brazil

The film features biographical data on one of the most popular Brazilian poets -- CASIMIRO DE ABREU.

Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan

1981 • 47 min

Various videos of the Manhattan skyline, shot by Brian Eno in 1980-81. Music from his albums Ambient 1 and 4 accompany the footage. Presented in vertical format (the television or monitor needs to be turned on its side for proper viewing).

Neil Sedaka: Live in Concert at the Jubilee Hall

1981 • 60 min

Music & Musicals, Rock & Roll Oldies, Rock & Pop - Performing for a packed house at Canada's Jubilee Hall, Neil Sedaka charms the sold-out crowd with delightful renditions of classics such as "Oh Carol," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" and "Laughter in the Rain." The set list also includes "Love Will Keep Us Together," "Solitaire," "Bad Blood," "The Immigrant," "That's When the Music Takes Me," "Standing on the Inside," "New York City Blues" and more.

L'heure exquise

1981 • 60 min • France

In the streets of Marseille, René Allio encounters, once again, the spaces of his childhood, and remembers his family history.

Flux Re Flux

1981 • 10 min • France

"A city, its crowds; crowds processed on film then transferred to video. I used a technique particular to video to manipulate a vertical section of the image sideways, changing both its shape and color density. Each operation was repeated a number of times, in a series of consecutive incrustations. The final image was achieved in a few hours, entirely by hand (or, more precisely, by hands), like an impromptu musical improvisation. The rhythm, the flux of the city confronted with video's scanning composition and compression." (Christian Lebrat)

In Search of Ladino

1981 • 60 min • Israel

In Search of Ladino follows Ladino speakers, their culture, their memories and hopes for their mother tongue. This unique film is one of the earliest works presenting Ladino-speaking Holocaust survivors in Israel, and it provides rare documentation of their testimonies and songs. Filmmaker David Perlov’s camera glances on the faces of the people, as he listens carefully to their stories and songs. The film was meant to be part of a trilogy about languages: Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino, but Perlov only managed to make the first film.

Arabic Numeral Series 11

1981 • 11 min

“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.”