All Films

Heart of Rock with Blood

1975 • 3 min

A ritual brings the stone heart to life.

Masks Of Grass

1975 • 7 min • United States of America

Shows children ways to create many different kinds of masks by weaving wild grasses into forms and shapes.

Filament (The Hands)

1975 • 7 min

In the politically charged atmosphere of the early 70s, Mikis Theodorakis conducted a concert of his music in Philadelphia. His music was banned in Greece, his own country, at that time by the US-funded junta. Visiting the US on a limited visa, he was restricted to musical appearances only - no public speaking permitted. His hands, eloquent even when their gestures are deprived (by silent filming) of the music they are making, speak. Several in-camera phenomena resulted from the highly-charged nature of the shoot.

Oregon - Live At Molde Jazz NRK TV

1975 • 37 min

Oregon live at the 15th International Jazz Festival in Molde, Norway August 18th 1975. Ralph Towner: guitar, piano / Paul McCandless: oboe, English horn, bass clarinet / Glen Moore: bass /Collin Walcott: tabla, percussion, sitar Tracks: 1. Nimbus 2. Rainmaker 3. Witchi-tai-to 4. Yet To Be

Performer/Audience/Mirror

1975 • 23 min

Using the mirror at the back of the stage as a monitor, Graham voices his unrehearsed observations, activating the various feedback cycles taking place within himself as performer, between the performer and audience, and among audience members. Issues of duration and attention are critical for both performer and audience.

Fannie Bell Chapman: Gospel Singer

1975 • 42 min

16mm color documentary based on fieldwork William Ferris conducted with gospel singer and folk healer Fannie Bell Chapman and her family in Centreville, Mississippi in the early 1970s. Footage includes Chapman and her daughters singing and praying during church services and at home, a healing service at the Chapman home, and Chapman "speaking in tongues" after healing. Members of the Chapman family also discuss the development of their faith, the call to heal and sing the Christian gospel, and their lives singing together.

Karl Marx

1975 • 3 min • United States of America

A picture of Karl Marx, his name spelled backward, three scribbles in a red, blue and black color : five combined elements that make a three minutes film. In case History forgets this man. J. P. Ceton.

Scopolamine

1975 • 13 min • United States of America

"Comfortably, as in its natural element, a camera swims coolly in the moltitude of the crown. It stares at an urban 70's America. An insistent melody in slow-motion gives a melancholic aspect to the show of these passers-by crossed and lost, the human crown of the time." -Cyril Hurel

Piano Rub

1975 • 4 min • United States of America

This frenetic, abstract work, created during Beams’s MacDowell residency, pairs direct rubbings of baby grand piano keys with Super8 footage of the process and a manipulated piano soundtrack.

Going Home Sketchbook

1975 • 3 min • United States of America

Reflecting on this deconstructed family portrait, Beams writes, “This film taught me a lot about Time, as I rotoscoped my family at our summer cottage in Indiana. I was at MacDowell during a cold and dreary fall. The hours I spent tracing my loved ones as they sat in the sunlight gave me a powerful tool for grabbing onto happiness. I came out of the summer-light Indiana trance into a chilly rainy New Hampshire autumn, ready to head back to dinner in the dark, and I felt as though I had been with my family all day, in the best place we all enjoyed together. It seemed as though, by spending hours drawing a few short moments in their lives, I could extend their time and mine on this earth. I felt I had control in providing more time to them by drawing more frames than each frame of original film.”

Cartoons: New York State Primaries

1975 • 6 min • United States of America

New York State Primaries shows stenciled lettering that dissolve between the words, “red,” “blue,” and “green” but don’t create secondary colors. The film is a response to Saul Levine’s 1972 NOTE: CHICAGO REDS AND BLUES.

Elaine Dart, Not Like Other People

1975 • 14 min

This documentary shows Elaine Dart's success in dealing with cerebral palsy. Through perseverance and patience, she learns to use her feet to accomplish such intricate tasks as threading a needle, stringing beads, and knitting.

30 Sound Situations

1975 • 10 min • Poland

30 Sound Situations is a performance which maps the acoustic properties of numerous divergent environments. In each situation, the artist stands in front of the camera (at various distances) and claps two pieces of wood against one another with sweeping gestures. The resulting sounds relate directly to the presented spaces, including: classroom, library, staircase, woodshop, backyard, and park, among others. Waśko taps into various sound effects in order to examine the potential for creating a new representation of space in film.

Light Shaft

1975 • 8 min

"Light Shaft" diagonally crosses the screen with a wedged light formation, usually on the diagonal. Its variations are rendered through arrangements of the tripod while panning the camera. Limiting the viewer's attention to a smaller screen, a point in space, allows for a certain confusion as to whether the rest of the (dark) screen blends itself into the surrounding blackness or is just a window into it.

Catch

1975 • 4 min

"Catch is a fragmented observation on hidden reflective surfaces, the corner of a dormant television screen, a window..." —Mike Reynolds

Screentest

1975 • 20 min

A fragmented cinematic portrait of nine talented amateur actors and mimes. A candid look at an unusually gifted group of avant garde artists coming together to experience and share each other's art. These gifted artists have made more than 75 8mm films themselves. Then as now, they did all the costumes, sets and make-up and created and acted all the roles. Featuring: Herman Costa, Noel Levert, Adolph Garza, Albert Elia, Stephen Cervantes, Ronald Koladzie, Phillip Haight, Pedro Barrios and Richard Hartenstein.

Restoring the Appearance to Order in 12 Minutes

1975 • 10 min

16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. The filmmaker performs her solitary act of cleaning. A static camera tightly frames the studio sink, dirty with paint and other residue while the artist engages in a concerted ritual of scrubbing and scraping … a treatise on the over-cleanliness of certain reductivist gestures in history of art making. (1975)

Le Cinéma

1975 • 5 min • Japan

After directing Kami Eiga (Paper Movie in 1972, which used paper film), I ended up with a dead track with Kanko Eiga (Sightseeing Movie of 1973). Ideas no longer arose. I realized that I needed a fresh start to make films, and I thought that carefully studying the object that is a second, the most basic unit of time, would allow me to do things again, to find a new way of living. That's why it can be called an exercise. It's a film in which I say to myself: it's a film; that's how the second is, that's what happens when a photogram is over. When the twenty-four photograms are passed, the film is finished. I had fun making this movie. It is a film for which nothing knows anything about the cinema or begins to study it. It tells us what the film is, and how it is done.

Media Burn

1975 • 23 min

Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collision of two of America's most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco's Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the "ultimate media event." In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a "Phantom Dream Car"—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets.

Pearls of the Persian Gulf: Dubai 1975

1975 • 43 min

Hara Factory Workers' Struggle

1975 • 52 min

Documentary about the harassment of striking garment factory workers in the city of Nakon Pathom, Thailand.

Rituals for a Still Life

1975 • 25 min

A stunning graphic composition of form and surface, Rituals for a Still Life links Gillette's video and collage work. Here he constructs a series of enigmatic collages that have as their background a television monitor showing his videotapes. Gillette builds a tension between static objects and the moving video images, both in the deliberate ambiguity of scale, and in the way these images flatten the video image. Meditative yet charged, these collages reveal surface abstraction rarely achieved in video.

Buraco da Comadre

1975 • 9 min • Brazil

Documentary short focusing on the people of a poor São Paulo neighborhood, whose lives are made difficult by a large hole on the ground that the government won't fix.

In the Beginning

1975 • 60 min

Sir Kenneth Clark discusses Egypt and the Nile Valley. Shows him traveling there and pointing out the ways in which Egypt flourished as an early civilization. Presents the art and architecture of that early time.