All Films

Mother

1979 • 16 min • Yugoslavia

Stole Popov's Oscar-nominated Dae depicts a group of Roma celebrating St. George's Day. The documentary doesn't contain dialogue, just footage of the festivity.

Oh Brother, My Brother

1979 • 14 min

This delightfully spontaneous film focuses on the love and affection two young brothers feel for each other. It captures the normal conflicts of early childhood -- the quick changes from happiness to sorrow, from cooperative play to tears and arguments -- all the while keeping these conflicts in perspective; showing them within the framework of the joy that the boys find in each other's presence. A wonderful children's film that enchants adults as well.

A Home for the Leopard

1979 • 10 min • Soviet Union

An ironic animated cartoon about how a foolish Leopard searched for a home. All the animals in the forest have a shelter where they can hide from bad weather — each of them has a house. Only the Leopard had not acquired a dwelling; his cubs get wet in the rain, and his wife sends him off to find a home. In his search for shelter, the foolish Leopard ends up in absurd and funny situations until he realizes that a home must be built by oneself, not taken from someone else.

Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women

1979 • 30 min • United States of America

Taking advertisements from magazines, newspapers, album covers and shop front windows, KILLING US SOFTLY presents specific examples of the ways in which advertisements reinforce stereotypes, affect our self-image and how we relate to each other, our concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normality. Using an intriguing mixture of statistics, humor, insight and outrage, Jean Kilbourne questions how far the use and abuse of women in advertising is connected to the sexual exploitation of women at large and the increasing incidence of child abuse.

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification

1979 • 6 min • United States of America

Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual #1 examines Black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, the film was made in an area of Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. Though the film is set in contemporary L.A., at first sight, Milanda and her environs (burnt-out houses overgrown with weeds) might seem to be located in Africa or the Caribbean, or at some time in the past. Structured as an Africanist ritual for Barbara McCullough’s “participant-viewers,” the film addresses how conditions of poverty, exploitation and anger render the Los Angeles landscape not as the fabled promised land for Black migrants, but as both cause and emblem of Black desolation. (Jacqueline Stewart)

Enthusiasm

1979 • 13 min

short film by Gordon Ball about the death of his mother

Domnick über Domnick

1979 • 43 min • Germany

Self portrait of psychiatrist, filmmaker, musician and art collector Ottomar Domnick.

The Perforated Cameraman

1979 • 9 min • Italy

In L’operatore perforato (1979) that plump sprocket hole comes into its own. It multiplies like a virus, riding serenely on the surface, nearly obliterating the images trembling underneath it. Near the close of the film, we watch another cameraman, perhaps shooting a Fatty Arbuckle imitator, cope with the invasion of perforations, not only from the top and center but from the edge. By now, when we can hardly tell the difference between frame and perforations, cinema’s two round-cornered rectangles, the image can be anything—a picture, or a zone of blank white.

Matrix [First Dream]

1979 • 28 min • United States of America

A film of multiple superimpositions, utilizing the images of Solariumagelani (Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice) (1974) overlaid with the hexagonal shapes that recur throughout Frampton's Magellan cycle.

Teshuinada, semana santa Tarahumara

1979 • 52 min • Mexico

Documentary about Tarahumara religious observances around Easter time.

Roman Numeral: I

1979 • 7 min

An attempt to conjure pictorially, from the mind, an image that isn't referential: "...I'd like to give something back, not a picture of a flower, but some flower that couldn't exist except on film." - S.B. "I'm not sure if this work is titled I for Imagnostic, or "I" as designating first person singular or Roman Numeral One."

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

1979 • 55 min • Canada

A compelling and revealing exploration of one person's psyche in crisis.... The film is a screen diary of a man in his early 30s afflicted with a life-threatening disease, a man confronting his own mortality.

Tree Frog

1979 • 18 min • Soviet Union

The tale of a tree frog that helped people cope with the drought.

The Tale of the Wonderful Doctor

1979 • 9 min • Soviet Union

The young man helps the old woman he meets get home. It turns out to be Death. She teaches him the secrets of healing, but makes him promise to abide by the agreement - if he sees her at the feet of a patient, he can treat him, but if she stands at his head, this person is hers. But circumstances are such that the doctor violates the agreement.

Provincetown Pieces

1979 • 51 min • United States of America

This is a shortened version of a three-movement film made over a summer’s stay in Provincetown, MA (Cape Cod), first alone, then with family. A journal of sorts, it renders the place with obvious affection. The town remains today, to an amazing degree, as it appears in this film from decades ago.

Feira de Campina Grande

1979 • 10 min • Brazil

Beats of the Heart: Rhythm of Resistance

1979 • 60 min

Rhythm of Resistance examines the vital role of music in the lives of black South Africans under the oppressive regime of apartheid.

Cut-Up

1979 • 3 min

A character, played by Jean-Yves André, is caught in the trap of a "closed room". After his disappearance, the voice of Nico is heard. "Fiction" is parasitized by the structure of the film and by the accumulation of references to Bataille, Burroughs, Calder, Lovecraft, Michaux, Warhol.

Free Show

1979 • 17 min • United Kingdom

A film in three acts, each act prefaced by a short circus act. Act 1 – Cutting liver, Act II – Ironing, Act III – Plucking Eyebrows. Three potentially violent domestic activities performed by a woman. Jayne Parker discovered film as a medium when she was a sculpture student at Canterbury College of Art (1977-80). In early works, objects, performance and gesture were combined by the camera to explore space, duration and the physical body. The images in these early films were both literal and metaphoric, depicting exact events but also creating physical and personal associations for the viewer. Ideas are evoked in images rather than words; ordinary actions are also enigmas.

Roman Numeral: III

1979 • 3 min

The third in this series of Imagnostic Films seems particularly magic to me in as much as I cannot even remember the photographic source of these images or, thus, having taken them. – S.B.

National Geographic: The Invisible World

1979 • 54 min

Each moment, events take place that the human eye cannot perceive because these occurrences are too small, too large, too fast, too slow or beyond the spectrum of visible light. Witness some of the captivating sights that will forever alter your knowledge and perception of the world around us. This 1979 classic video shows us that 'hidden' world. Different sizes, different spectrums, and even different rates of speed can illuminate the underlying processes that are beyond the limits of our eyes.

A Piece For Sunlight, Piano and 45 Fingers

1979 • 10 min

45 fingers were needed to play the film soundtrack mimicking the sun's movement over four months on piano keys.

Ciné regards: Tess: Roman Polanski

1979 • 49 min • France

Television documentary about the making of Roman Polanski's 1979 film, Tess.

Untitled: 'Silueta' Sequence No. 3

1979 • 3 min

United States 1979, Super 8 transferred to digital, colour, silent, 3 min