All Films

Sequentia

1980 • 43 min • France, United States of America

"The images appear from nowhere and elsewhere, intermittent. Time is measured by memory and movement, the printed ribbon will be the support of the memory." -Lightcone.org

These Words are the Data

1980 • 13 min • United States of America

These words are data shows how information can be manipulated with different ways by the computer ; each signs is translated to numbers following the ASCII code. Those numbers are then utilized to set the color and the music. As soon as the structure is recognized by the computer programming system, it becomes automatic. The artist is working on the definition of a conceptual system.

Change In The Weather, Every Cloud

1980 • 10 min

Amateur tale about a company boss and his wife who turn up late for a dinner party hosted by an ambitious young salesman of his company and his wife. After their car breaks down they have to change a wheel in the rain, arriving soaking wet, where their young hosts dry them out and give them a nice meal.

Lempad of Bali

1980 • 56 min

A film about the life and death of the 116-year-old Balinese Master-Artist.

J'aimais encore cette vallée

1980 • 18 min • France

Shadow of a Journey

1980 • 20 min

"Shadow of a Journey begins, visually, with a movement of watery images flickering across the screen; and meanwhile, on the sound track, a woman sings a Gaelic song. Shadows on the sunlit water are identifiable as those of a ship"s from the ferry whose passage is causing the water to churn across the picture. ... The apparent situation is the familiar one of a journey during which the passing scene is registered but only partially engages the thoughts." - LUX

Diminished

1980 • 7 min

"I made this for my step-father who had passed away. I had an old 'Ambrotype' and if you held it up to the light, you could scratch away the backing to expose the negative. I set it up on an animation stand and created the sequence. This framed a central sequence of still photographs depicting a hospital visit." –RM

Birds Hunting

1980 • 7 min • Romania

Experimental film on 16mm by Emanuel Țeț as part of Kinema Ikon.

The Day is two feet long

1980 • 8 min • Netherlands

16 et 1 Variations

1980 • 18 min

The music is by composer Jean-Yves Bosseur. Film made from the work of Albert Ayme: 16 AND 1 VARIATIONS, made in 1963. The film is a series of variations of variations. Albert Ayme: "Each variation generates a new structure, each one is autonomous and treated like a stony runaway". So I analyzed each work, found its own structure, traveled the opposite path of the painter, materializing the different stages, using cutouts of transparent paper, creating inside each structure found new phases, new variations, with the help of which I was able to develop the film sequences.

Lost for Words

1980 • 25 min

A parody on the post urban devastation wasteland film with a slant on 'rectangular' thought patterns in which a little girl recites from Marx's Communist Manifesto between two cardboard cut out trees and Alfa, the last man on earth to read and write (improvised by Yehuda Safran), is interviewed on TV (improvised by painter Jock McFadyen); with cameo performances by Alexe Sayle eating a Chelsea bun, David Medalla and Oriel de Quadras in non-sensical conversation and Giles Leaman consming reams of rectangular text.

PM Magazine/Acid Rock

1980 • 4 min • United States of America

Appropriating material from the introduction to the nightly television show, PM Magazine and a commercial for Wang Computers, Birnbaum uses enlarged still-frames from each of the sources to compound a new image of the indelible American Dream. To the soundtrack of an acid rock version of The Doors' L.A. Woman, repetitive images of an ice skater, baton twirler, cheerleader, and young girls licking ice cream, exemplify dominant cultural images of women — images that emphasize their performative nature: the idea that woman is a spectacle arranged for the (male) viewer's pleasure. The culimination of a series of works from 1978-82 dealing directly with television imagery and ideology, this tape is one of four channels shown simmultaneously in Birnbaum's installation at Documenta 9, in 1982.

Theatre of the Horse and Moon

1980 • 13 min

"The former is one that reminded me of Méliès, with its simple but profoundly affecting special effects, such as a shadow puppet-like model of a ship being carried against well-lit backgrounds; Bruns renders the artlessness artful, and his modest ambitions exude the purity of early cinema. " - Karen Sachs

Stiff Little Fingers: Live at Rockpalast

1980 • 60 min • Germany

Stiff Little Fingers perform hits live at the Rockpalast festival in Durtmund, Germany in 1980

Bed Desert

1980 • 5 min

My favorite of the program is BED DESERT (5 min, silent), which is something of an outlier. In this inventive little film, the ripples of bed sheets are juxtaposed with images of the desert (or are they?), the formal ruse playful and intriguing. -Karen Sachs

The Poet and the Pond

1980 • 6 min

More evocations of this style are evident in the shorter film THE POET AND THE POND (6 min, sound), an amalgam of patterns and repetitions that also bring to mind both the disciplined litanies of Marcel Duchamp and the surreal dreamscapes of Salvador Dali. (Scharres indicated in her piece that Bruns “is largely unfamiliar with the tradition into which his work clearly falls,” making all these comparisons, hers and mine, thought-provoking. How is it that an artist can so fully exude his own style that seems to be the product of certain influences, but isn’t?) -Karen Sachs

Bingo

1980 • 6 min

In stark opposition to the rest of the program’s surreality are the documentary-esque BINGO (6 min, silent) and DUCK (3 min, silent), the subjects of which are more or less aligned with their titles. -Karen Sachs

He is Wanted

1980 • 38 min • Soviet Union

Influenced by Italian neorealism and by the social environment of the heroes: ruins, landscapes, Khrushchev-apartment houses rising on the outskirts of the Vilnius.

The Unusual Book

1980 • 10 min

THE UNUSUAL BOOK is more thoughtfully stylized in its depiction of a living book featuring a woman’s face on and around which things happen, including delightfully crude animations utilizing paint, fabric and random oddities. -Karen Sachs

Earth Saga

1980 • 23 min

"Based on Icelandic landscape, EARTH SAGA reveals the powerful beauty of a land formed by volcanic explosion. From steaming lava ash to moss-covered fields, the film redefines color and black and white images, superimposing abstract and surreal visions of nature. Original shooting was done in both 16mm and Super 8mm enabling the filmmaker to alter the inherent texture of the compositions through optical printing techniques of extending sequences, re-framing and superimposing. The resulting footage forms new flowing and rhythmic patterns in an illusionistic translation of landscape. The film is to be preceded by the reading of the poem 'Earth Saga' which was written at the time of the shooting. A copy is enclosed with the film." - RS

Scrap Artist

1980 • 11 min • Egypt

A documentary short telling about Salah Abdel Karim the scrap artist.

Remnants of the Watts Festival

1980 • 60 min

The Watts Summer Festival is one of the oldest African American cultural festivals in the United States. The Watts community founded the event in 1966, one year after the Watts uprising. Ulysses Jenkins's film captures moments from the festival, including footage from a performance by the band War. This California funk band—famous for songs such as "Low Rider," "The Cisco Kid," and "Why Can't We Be Friends?"—was also well known for its multiethnic membership. The 1972 Watts Festival was one of the first events that Jenkins filmed, and he captured the underlying issues of community and commemoration that defined the annual event. At the time the local news media would, in Jenkins's opinion, misrepresent the festival by issuing warnings about it, and the artist's own footage served to counteract the media's negative view.

Film - An Exercise in Illusion I

1980 • 3 min

Film - transformed reality as light on the screen.

Stereomania

1980 • 7 min • Romania

A visit to a Romanian disco where the rhythms of songs like Iko Iko and Invisible Sun interweave with. The edited footage from dance floors, concert halls, and stages is a multi-channel remix of the original recorded material with the filmmaker’s edited appropriated documentary footage.