All Films

Chitrakathi

1977 • 19 min • India

Chitrakathi is about the folk artists of western India who narrate with the help of leather puppets. Mani takes us to the sleepy Konkan coastal village and introduces us to the family that has preserved this unique art for several centuries.

Six Colorful Inside Jobs

1977 • 33 min

Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary colors.

Misconception

1977 • 43 min • United States of America

B. Ruby Rich writes, "MISCONCEPTION is composed of six parts that together chronicle the experience of one woman and her husband during the course of her natural childbirth. The film communicates the precision and care with which it has been assembled. [The] structure lends the film a pacing rhythm that has less to do with traditional cinema-verité documentary or film journalism than with the pacing and rhythm of poetry."

Office Baroque

1977 • 44 min

Matta-Clark made a cut in a five-story commercial building located in front of the Steen, a tourist spot in Antwerp. (On Matta-Clark's death shortly after, an attempt was made to save the work as a future museum of contemporary art, but the building was demolished.)

Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained

1977 • 40 min • United States of America

Taking aim at the social standardization enforced particularly on women's bodies, Rosler critiques the politics of "objective" or scientific evaluation that result in the depersonalization, objectification, and colonization of women and Others.

Samba the Great

1977 • 14 min • Niger

The adventures of the legendary hero, Sambagana, who, dazzled by the beauty of a princess, asks for her hand in marriage, but first he must make her laugh. This demand imposes grueling, yearslong trials, in which he emerges victorious, but only death will eventually bring the two together.

The Tale of Ivan, Pan and Poverty

1977 • 9 min • Soviet Union

One gentleman did not give rest to ordinary people, all his offerings and dues were not enough. On purpose, he went home with the poor, taking the last thing he found. It was the turn of Ivan, who did not grieve that they took away their hard-won possessions, but decided to punish the impudent villain and his henchmen, resorting to one trick…

Two Little Bears

1977 • 17 min • Soviet Union

About careful handling of toys.

Entrevista de Humberto Mauro a David Neves e Alex Viany

1977 • 24 min

Celebrating his 80th birthday, pioneer Brazilian filmmaker Humberto Mauro talks about his life, work, and the project "A Noiva da Cidade".

Daydream Therapy

1977 • 8 min • United States of America

Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field

Love It Like a Fool

1977 • 28 min

A documentary film about the (then) 76 year old American folk songwriter Malvina Reynolds. Through the film, viewers follow Malvina as she composes, records an album, performs in concert, rehearses with young musicians and manages her record and publishing companies. We get to see Malvina's attitudes towards aging and dying, her thoughts about romance and her ideas about social change.

The Receding Landscape

1977 • 10 min

TV Fighter (Cam Era Plane)

1977 • 11 min

TV Fighter (CAM-ERA-PLANE), 1977 plays with the experiences of real-time and the video copy, presenting in several iterations a fragment of World War II footage taken from the point of view of a fighter plane as it machine-guns targets on land and sea. Using a Russian-doll structure of images repeatedly rerecorded and reframed, Hall toys with the viewer’s manifold experiences of live and recorded time: the historical time of archival footage, the live experience of watching it on a screen, the déjà vu of watching that “live” footage again on another monitor. This nesting of recorded images within other recorded images implies an emergent sensibility in which the present moment is continually being recorded and reframed by audiovisual apparatus, but crucially Hall’s approach to this phenomenon is as playful as it is provocative. (artforum)

Becky's Eye

1977 • 4 min • United States of America

A study of sunlight refracted through drinking glasses.

Albedo 0.97

1977 • 12 min • Germany

Reflections of snow

Cat on TV

1977 • 3 min • United Kingdom

Extinction of the Dinosaurs

1977 • 3 min • Canada

This film illustrates the theory that a sudden change in climate caused by a stellar explosion resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Candomblé in Dahomey

1977 • 22 min • Benin, Brazil

A sacrifice ritual in Dahomey [Benin].

Norbert Kröcher & Operation Leo

1977 • 8 min • Sweden

Following the 1975 West German Embassy siege in Stockholm, the German Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist Norbert Kröcher allegedly planned to kidnap Anna-Greta Leijon. The goal was to exchange Leijon for 8 of his comrades held in German prisons. The plan, known as Operation Leo, was intercepted by the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) and Kröcher and other team members was arrested on 31 March in Stockholm.

Tragoedia

1977 • 35 min • United States of America

This film was conceived about 10 years ago when I heard Norman O. Brown define "Tragedy" as "goat-song" (or as Webster has it: "Greek tragoidia fr. tragos goat + aiedein to sing; prob. fr. the satyrs represented by the original chorus"). I disagree with the last part of the Webster explanation and tend to think that the quality of sound of goats crying did prompt the Greeks to choose this term for their drama. In any case, the film TRAGOEDIA is also ironic (thus, perhaps the Latin of its title) as often is goat "lamentation"; and finally I should quote this from O.E.D.: "As to the reason of the name many theories have been offered, some even disputing the connexion with 'goat.'"

Nanka

1977 • 5 min • Japan

An experimental short.

Provincial Towns

1977 • 10 min • Yugoslavia

The collage of everyday impressions of social modernization; mixed cultures of old and new mediums, traditions and folklore…

Decisions Decisions!

1977 • 13 min

The new kid in town must decide whether or not he wants to be friends with a social outcast.

I Like Life a Lot

1977 • 9 min • Hungary

The Komló settlement was a typical example of how Roma labour was exploited in the 1970s industrial mass production. This collaboration of Roma pupils and their teachers portrays the children’s everyday lives through their own drawings, often translating cruel facts into fairytales.