All Films

Excerpts from the Diary

1975 • 10 min

Directed by Ian Breakwell.

White Heart

1975 • 53 min

Legendary among filmmakers who have witnessed it, White Heart is a symphonic exploration of cinematic meaning that unfolds through a multi-layered, contrapuntal audio-visual montage of numerous and disparate ingredients: images of city streets, verdant forests, and ocean waves; bits of film leader and editor’s marks; oblique footage of Barnett’s colleagues Larry Gottheim and Saul Levine; an interview with two young missionaries; the sounds of classical music, typewriters, video tone, and, most centrally, a brief passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. These elements and more emerge and re-emerge like musical motifs, continuously and meticulously altered through processes like bleaching, staining, and multiple print generation, dramatically extracting the formal particularities of the Kodachrome reversal print.

Hannah Weiner

1975 • 10 min

Another short film by Niblock which consists simply of Hannah Weiner reading from one of her texts, initially in close-up and then over footage of her in her office and then in her armchair..

Topiltzin

1975 • 17 min • El Salvador

An experimental short film about a day in the life of a barefoot boy who sells newspapers in San Salvador.

Sister, If You Only Knew

1975 • 51 min • Australia

This film explores the pressures experienced by Aboriginal women living in the city, and the effect that these pressures also have on their men and their children. In spite of all life's difficulties, the women seem to survive the urban environment better than the men. Their humour, intelligence and resilience in the face of adversity shines through.

Study in Diachronic Motion

1975 • 3 min

A first experiment in diachronic motion: the simultaneous presentation of an action from several different perspectives in time.

Stair Piece

1975 • 5 min

Experimental short about some stairs.

Always Love Your Man

1975 • 21 min

Cara Devito’s intimate portrait of her grandmother who recounts the abuse she suffered at her husband’s hand

The Family Holiday

1975 • 8 min • United Kingdom

Got your holidays booked yet? Take a look at what Terminal Tours have to offer in this consciously coarse comic cartoon.

Brooklyn Bathroom Piece

1975 • 14 min

Luiz Sá

1975 • 10 min • Brazil

Documentary about the artist, cartoonist and pioneer of Brazilian animation Luiz Sá.

Yaa Bôé

1975 • 8 min • Burkina Faso, France

Shot in a country inhabited by Mossi people (Western Africa), Yaa Bôé is a poem that calls for visual decolonisation, relying on the technical and ideological foundations of audiovisual recordings and connecting them with a theoretical text by Dominique Avron.

Made in Mississippi

1975 • 18 min

A 16mm documentary based on fieldwork that William Ferris conducted with African American folk artists throughout Mississippi. Footage includes Richard Foster at the "dog trot" house he grew up in, basket maker Leon "Peck" Clark, quilter Amanda Gordon, floral gardener Esther Criss, cane fife maker Otha Turner, painter and cane maker Lester Willis, and sculptor James "Son" Thomas. The artists discuss their informal training, artisic motivation and vision, and the value they attach to their art while working on their crafts.

The Knife

1975 • 4 min

In The Knife (1975) red light falls onto a knife against a dark background, coating the silvery blade inch by inch until it is fully illuminated. The experiment is then repeated in green, then in light red, next blue, and finally pale yellow. It’s a very Hitchcockian approach to creating meaning, as if all the elements - object, colour, space and time - had been isolated from the suspense, only to be reconstructed anew, creating silent, artificial drama. And, as with Hitchcock, the motifs are fetishistically charged: knife, dog, door, bird, lion: ‘...they are all Freudian in some sense’, observed Goldstein.

Mouth to Mouth

1975 • 8 min

English and Korean words appear on the screen, a mouth forms the shape of an "O," then opens and closes. Is this the beginning of language? In this early videotape, Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act — a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes — so that this ordinary action becomes something primal and riveting.

Notes from Light Music

1975 • 12 min

A compressed, single-screen version of Rhodes’ famous fusion of optical sound and image. Light Music was shown in a 16 mm single screen format (1976). This version is a digital translation. The ‘score’ is divided into five movements which are characterised by their differing duration, pitch and accent of sounds. – Lis Rhodes

USA Time

1975 • 8 min • Switzerland

Un Supermaschio

1975 • 25 min

Objects in Our Daily Lives

1975 • 6 min • Canada

Close-up photographs of baskets, tools and utensils used in the past and still used today by the L'ilawat of Canada. Printed notes describe the use of each item

Human Events

1975 • 5 min • Japan

A work with two projectors, Human Events is a film made for a dance performance by Kazuko Tsujimura at Kinokuniya Hall, Shinjuku, Tokyo. The images comprise of extreme close-ups of the dancer’s body that is massaged by a finger as the colour of the image changes. Arranged in a two (side)-by-three (down) composition, different parts of the body gets scattered in ways that defy the familiar order of the anatomy.

Red Light

1975 • 7 min

Like BLACK & LIGHT, this film is also made without a camera. The image is perforated directly by a computer into two opaque 16mm strips. But this time, an additional step has been taken at the printing stage: the two strips (printed in A&B rolls) are each filtered with a different color.

Ryszard Cieslak: The Body Speaks

1975 • 54 min

Ryszard Cieslak and other members of the Polish Laboratory Theater demonstrate exercises designed to prepare the mind and body for performance.

The Memory

1975 • 13 min

The precise portrait of a woman who is present and fey at the same time, who is as tired as she is courageous and who seems to have surrendered and emancipated at once.

Subway Loop

1975 • 11 min • Canada

This three-channel installation, from the Modern Television Loop Series, utilizes the qualities of real and edited time. “Three views of Toronto’s underground action; trains pull in, pause, doors open, crowds exchange places, whirl off into oblivion. It is mesmerizing, this subsurface world. You could sit and watch for hours as the hypnotic qualities of TV sets and passing trains act together”. - Peggy Gale, 1977, Only Paper Today.