All Films

Chromaticité I

1977 • 11 min • France

I saw people flee in fright before the force of Chromaticité I, during which I remained fastened to my seat, in the clutches of fear. The last image, the screen turns white: I glance at my neighbour, immobilised just as myself. (Bernard Weidmann, Rhizome Hérétique, 1980)

After Cease to Exist

1977 • 20 min

"A film dealing with the borderline between evidence, crime, fetish and dream..."

The Occult: Mysteries Of The Supernatural

1977 • 23 min • United States of America

Rare 1977 documentary short hosted by Christopher Lee on the occult. Topics range from witch covens, Astrology, psychic powers, seances and astral projection, amongst others.

The Hunt for Bo Hansson

1977 • 28 min • Sweden

A film story about the composer and musician Bo Hansson, once half of Hansson & Carlsson. Bo Hansson is now better known abroad than in Sweden. He has composed numerous books including Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'.

Impulse

1977 • 5 min • Indonesia

An early experimental abstract animation, made by drawing directly on to 16mm film.

Willy Whistle

1977 • 7 min • United States of America

A police safety film which introduces young children to Willy, a lisping, cartoon whistle. Willy shrilly extols the virtues of looking both ways before crossing the street.

Shave & Send

1977 • 16 min

The films of Jorge O Mourão, a collection of autobiographical performance pieces, constitute visceral reactions to the authoritarian regime in Brazil and channel the paranoia and claustrophobia of his generation through the disjunction of sound and image.

The Day I Died

1977 • 14 min • United States of America

A creepy synthesizer score underlines the melodramatic horror of this cautionary mini-drama. It's a "great day for the beach" when our handsome, likable California surfer-blond hero runs into some pals. Unused to alcohol, he gets very high on buddy Joe's vodka (stashed in a 7-Up bottle), leaving him ill-equipped to drive the car he's just brought home. Things get ever more ghoulish as he witnesses the bleak and tearful events that follow his tragic demise. One assumes many a classroom was left either giggling or traumatized (or both) as he screams his final pleas to God as he's being buried. That's edutainment!

Du regard comme objet (b)

1977 • 7 min • France

When going from a painting job to a cinematographic work, I felt the need to establish the basic concepts of my creative activity. The day before I left the workshop where I had been working for two years, I decided to make a film about the glances thrown by the passers-by of the rue Louis-Blanc in the window of this room. —Jakobois

Terzake

1977 • 44 min • Netherlands

Political texts from the journal In Search, edited by M.S. Arnoni (Wim Schlebaum)

Esmeralda

1977 • 52 min • France

With Esmeralda, Hernandez shifts to the romantic mythology, but this descriptive aspect is secondary in the filmmaker's work, whose purpose is the constitution, by interposed myths, of a baroque cinematographic language. From this point of view, he joins the approaches of other contemporary filmmakers like Bene or Schroeter. In Esmeralda, he introduces masks from his creation to work on the physical and not only the filmic material. But Hernandez adds to his series of aesthetic variations of "stock-shots" of war plans, desolations, genocides, which brutally fall within the visual framework of his film. The filmmaker thus points out the cracks that overflow the myth in its darkest areas: the historical and social reality that obsesses us, that terrorizes us every moment.

A Visit to the Underground Cities of Mars

1977 • 59 min • United States of America

Take a psychic voyage and see for yourself the underground cities of Mars! Our neighbors on Mars have developed a peaceful lifestyle that is technologically and spiritually far in advance of our own. This amazing film, completed before the Viking lander’s photographs revealed what appear to be the remains of an ancient civilization on the surface of Mars, portrays beautiful underground cities. Discover how the Martians learned to live in peace and harmony.

Sur Faces

1977 • 58 min

Emshwiller writes that Sur Faces is a "stylized collaborative videotape in which actors working with (the artist) explore sexual politics as expressed in styles of drama from Shakespeare to 19th-century social theater, early 20th-century Freudian work, and contemporary fictional autobiographical improvisation. A video collage juxtaposing different ways of using video to express psychological states and conflict." In a synthesis of densely processed, textural images with documentations of dramatic role-playing from sources as varied as Richard III, Strindberg, and the Open Theater, Emshwiller undertakes an inventive inquiry into the transformation and representation of male/female relationships, via video and theater.

Made for Denise

1977 • 5 min • United States of America

Through the use of original and appropriated video footage, Auder translates a religious sermon into an expression of love for this strikingly beautiful woman. This lovers tale opens with a photograph of Denise that is alternately caressed and crushed in the palm of her lover's hand; a gesture oscillating between affection and an obsessive and irrational desire for possession. Auder builds on the increasing grandeur of the sermon's metaphors, extending them into the realm of destruction. The mood undergoes a violent shift as what was once fruit and flowers abruptly gives way to catastrophe. Featuring the music of Philip Glass, whose acquaintance Auder made in the early 1970s while producing work for The Kitchen.

Radioactive Phenomenon

1977 • 20 min • Soviet Union

Educational film for students in the "Chemistry of radioactive transformations."

La tasse

1977 • 19 min • France

A sexagenarian transvestite in his room, confronted with his fantasies and his solitude.

Berlin

1977 • 15 min • Netherlands

The filmmaker travels by train from France to Berlin. In six short chapters, we see the journey and the city. These are short still lives that remove the sense of anonymity from the everyday.

Malik

1977 • 8 min • France

Egypte

1977 • 12 min • Canada

ÉGYPTE is a meditation on ancient time and space. Inspired by the Tibetan Tantric chants of the Lamas (which also comprises the sound track), this impressionistic piece presents the ancient sense of 'mystery' without recourse to narration or didactic (historical) interpretation.

Stagnation

1977 • 50 min • France

A girl uses spiritualism to escape her loneliness and neurasthenia. Inspired by practices more or less close to magic, she tries to create two characters that will be part of herself. She will be able to live without being alone, while fleeing the external reality. But little by little, the two beings that she created appear to be detached from her, as if the figure three could not agree to the harmony of the group. Her fantasies seem to turn against her, increasing her sense of isolation.

The Anna Contract

1977 • 30 min

A scientist arrives from Eastern Europe to London. A man, hired to kill her, takes up a sniping position in a terraced rooming-house opposite the building in which the scientist is closeted with an interrogator.

Autopsy of Forgetting

1977 • 5 min • Romania

Experimental film on 16mm by Ioan T. Morar as part of Kinema Ikon.

Color Fields Left

1977 • 8 min

A study in analog imaging and the relation of sound to image, Color Fields Left merges moving bands of color with electronic sounds in an increasingly complex pattern.

A Ride Through the Fields

1977 • 13 min

A woman on horseback discovers several books out in a field that transform into the people they represent from a myriad of time periods and cultures. As the people interact their need to communicate creates both friction and the changing of perceptions.