All Films

Merging the subjective and the objective, the autobiographical and the anthropological, The Laughing Alligator is a highly personal observation of an indigenous South American culture. Recorded while he and his family were living among the Yanomami of Venezuela, this compelling work distills Downey's search for his own cultural identity and heritage through the encounter between the Western family and the so-called "primitive" tribe. Challenging the anthropological view of the Yanomami as violent cannibals, Downey focuses on the tribe's myths, rituals and ceremonies, documenting funerary rites in which tribal members eat the pulverized ashes of their dead to insure their immortality. Subverting conventional modes of ethnographic documentary, Downey participates as an active presence, "shooting" with his video camera as a means of creating an interactive dialogue between artist and subject and addressing his own "yearning for a purer existence."

A film by Pat O'Neill

Once thought lost, but recently found and restored by Anthology Film Archives, artist/philosopher Manuel De Landa’s Super 8 Ism Ism captures his truly inspired collage mutations of New York City subway ads during the mid-to-late 70s. Slicing and dicing the perfect faces of models into deviant ghouls, Ism Ism turns the homogenate into the ripening rot of nightmares.

'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'

A bewitching, mysterious work of enveloping beauty, the film’s ominous title and a dedication to Anne Frank deeply inform our reading of its haunting subtext. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with the National Film Preservation Foundation, in 2009.

“One day at the beach…a typically Australian day…something I really looked forward to, when I first came here as a migrant (Bondi was the first surfing beach I’d ever seen). In the early ’60s there was hardly a weekend I didn’t go to the beach. But it wasn’t until many, many years later that I was filmically advanced enough to make a film about it. The simplicity of just turning the camera on and letting people do what they wanted to in front of the lends appealed to me…the carefree atmosphere appealed to me…the carefree atmosphere of the beach captured with the innocence of early cinema. I didn’t even look through the lens. Shooting horizontal mattes allowed me to play with the density of what was going on…the surreality of the beach, the waves of water and people, the hot and cold of sun and surf, overexposure…heat rising up, surfers riding waves in the sky and into buildings, seagulls ducking beneath the mattes, then re-appearing.” (Paul Winkler)

Jolly sing-song with an important message; switch off all appliances before going to bed, because your life could depend on it.

1979 Spanish experimental short

Feyers is Dirk de Bruyn's most complicated work employing the many techniques he has experimented with over the years. Appropriately subtitled 'a dance', this film's interweaving of various experimentations lends itself to a stunning, rhythmic effect.

Coming out of a persistent dream, it is difficult to be in reality right away. For the sleeper who is then awake, the sounds, the shapes continue to play a show: where is he and how can he know?

1979 German super 8 short work

This episode from Histories of Love and Carnage, the first adult-oriented animated feature in Spain, offers a scatological, decidedly unsentimental view of sexuality and old age.

Includes three plots: “The Bear with a Sweet Tooth,” “The Boastful Bunny,” and “The Ungrateful Little Goat.”

About loons that have found shelter on the roof of a modern big house.

Carried by chamanics and cosmics vibrations music, this movie present us Aloual, the fetish actor, in a kind of naked and listless semi-captivity. Sustained by bandages, half floating in the airs, arrowed by glances, this St-Sebastian is the heart of a ritual who combine plastic beauty, Chrisitc's dolor and pagan's voluptuous pleasures.

A shearer, his wife and six children leave their farmhouse at daybreak for the week's big event - a Saturday visit to the nearest town, Lake Cargelligo. There's a trip to the barber, icecream for the kids, the weekly football match and a beer at the pub. Come nightfall, it's either a movie or the local dance. This beautifully shot film by Academy Award winner Dean Semler captures all the atmosphere of a weekly ritual repeated in country towns right across Australia.

Scenes from the three last days of the festival in which the population of the old Kingdom of Jau participate yearly.

Wings white, she's red, wings scream, she sings, wings fly, she moans, wings rise, she hides, wings move, she teaches me. Leila, night name, exhumates my childhood memories and introduces me to the marvelous.

“In a wry exploration of women’s sexuality, the character Pussy demonstrates the play between the masculine and the feminine, the strong and the passive, the observer and the observed, as she metamorphoses between female, feline and male figures. As the film demonstrates, animation is a form ideally suited to render the process of metamorphosis.” —Dr. Marian Quigley

Eugenia Balcells presents an interesting reflection on the relationship between image, space and time.

This animated short features a night watchman who, with his dog Fang, discovers that museums are not just a collection of dusty old artefacts. With humour, the film shows how the past is very much alive and connected to our present.

The densest film of the divided-frame group is the aptly titled 1978 Networks, which includes as many as 20 exposures of the same roll of film. Here only one slit was used, but Lebrat combines within one image many narrow strips taken at diverse Paris locations, sometimes seen through colored filters. The enclosed, even claustrophobic space of the strips contrasts with Lebrat’s superimposition of them and with the movement within the strips and by the strips within the frame... (Fred Camper)