All Films

Gradiva: Esquisse I

1978 • 26 min • France

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.

How Longing Was Defeated

1978 • 21 min • Soviet Union

The Merry Master arrived in the enchanted city and defeated the evil witch Tosca.

El Capitan

1978 • 57 min • United States of America

The Brain Leeches

1978 • 55 min • United States of America

Invading aliens are taking over the brains of folks in a small town. The head leech is a wad of black tinfoil with a couple of white thumbtacks for eyes. Others are spidery-like rubber things pulled along by strings.

New Wings

1978 • 40 min • Japan

Das gestörte Fest

1978 • 27 min • East Germany

The devil is bored in hell and organizes an unbearable concert that even disturbs his grandmother. She sends him to earth to fetch Gretel to relieve his boredom.

Jugend TV

1978 • 45 min • Switzerland

Swiss TV Special from 1978.

The Little Hawk

1978 • 15 min • Soviet Union

A kitten and a young boy live in a small fisherman's hut. The boy's father calls him Little Hawk. The threesome are poor but happy, and the father goes to sea every day to fish. One day, there is a storm at sea and the father doesn't come home...

Song of the Canary

1978 • 30 min • United States of America

The film documents the Occidental Petroleum plant in Manteca, California and the scandal in which employees became sterile after being exposed to the pesticide DBCP.

Yasujiro Ozu and the Taste of Sake

1978 • 15 min

A 1978 episode of the French television program Ciné regards, featuring critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec, that looks back on Ozu’s career.

Five in Millions

1978 • 27 min • United Kingdom

Captures the work of the British Rail Parcel Service, illustrating the story of five different consignments over a twenty-four hour period. These are: a schoolboy in Cheshire being sent a new bicycle; a housewife in Rhondda Valley awaiting the arrival of a new vacuum cleaner; a man in Lincoln expecting an insurance cheque; a tourist in Cornwall waiting for his daily newspaper to arrive at his hotel; and a research scientist who urgently needs some equipment in Manchester.

The Mountain Master

1978 • 18 min • Soviet Union

In the Urals there are mountains all around. One mountain is called Copper, and it has its own Mistress. For a bad person to meet her is grief, and for a good person - little good.

Women of Suriname

1978 • 55 min • Netherlands, Suriname

Oema Foe Sranang (1978), translated in Dutch as Vrouwen van Suriname, was a film made in close collaboration with LOSON (Landelijke Organisatie Strijd Organisatie Suriname). This anti-colonial, feminist portrait of the lives of five Surinamese women came about after the recent independence of Suriname in 1975, also shedding a light on the experience of the Surinamese migrants entering the Netherlands and the Dutch hostile attitude towards this large flow of migrants.

Omai Fa'atasi: Samoa Mo Samoa

1978 • 32 min

The dilemmas and challenges facing Samoan Americans are frankly explored in this film about Omai Fa’atasi, a Southern Californian community group. It is one of the first films documenting Pacific Islander communities on the North American continent.

Reflections on a Political Cinema

1978 • 25 min • France

This documentary addresses the challenges facing the Italian film industry in 1978 by focusing on the television productions of Francesco Rosi's CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (1979) and Elio Petri's LE MANI SPORCHE (1978)

Candy Candy: Candy's Summer Vacation

1978 • 19 min • Japan

As the long-awaited summer holidays begin, Candy and her friends go hiking in the mountains. However, a heavy rainstorm interrupts their leisure, making them hide in the forest. After the rain has stopped, the friends are ready to proceed, but Candy gets herself into some serious trouble when she encounters a cute bear cub.

The Most Beautiful of All Mothers

1978 • 30 min • Canada, France, Lebanon

Interviews with mothers and family members who lost loved ones in the Lebanese conflict with Israel.

Elements

1978 • 2 min

One of the earlier works Hill produced on the Rutt/Etra video synthesizer, Elements combines abstract “landscapes” with fragmented syllabic language. Undulating topological forms superimpose themselves on one another, changing their shape and direction of movement.

L'Occhio L'Orecchio La Bocca

1978 • 20 min • Italy

A short documentary about a 70s Roman film club.

Offering

1978 • 3 min • Argentina

Short film that shows daisies throughout the day with music as an accompaniment.

The Red Bowmen

1978 • 58 min • Papua New Guinea

Every year, a ritual known as ida is performed by the Umeda people, who inhabit the dense primary forest of the Waina-Sawanda district of West Sepik, Papua New Guinea. Ida, the central social and cultural drama of the Umeda, is a fertility ritual, in which a dominant theme is the metamorphosis of the cassowaries. An ethnography by anthropologist Alfred Gell, Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries, complements the film.

Ni scène ni coulisses

1978 • 10 min

Three dancers, alternately disembodied or discernible, move through abstract motions. Sometimes they move against backgrounds, sometimes they incorporate them. Electro-acoustical music further heightens the other-worldly atmosphere of this experimental dance film. Special effects, animation and live shooting combine to create a complex of unusual images. Film without words.

Commemorative Photo

1978 • 3 min • Japan

An extraordinary animated work composed of 99 still images. The bizarre story of the mechanized walking doll “Margaret” kidnapping and confining a female student in a sailor-style school uniform is realized with a precisely calculated method of full in-camera editing of one 100-foot reel. The filmmaker himself appears in this humorous, radical Pop film, one of Nakamura’s best-known works.

Sleeping Vampire

1978 • 60 min • Japan

In the town of Arkham in 1927, a series of female murders occur. An exorcist arrives in a town gripped by fear.