All Films

And Do You Have The Sun?

1974 • 13 min • Soviet Union

Bretonneries pour Kodachrome

1974 • 13 min • France

When you cannot afford a photo safari in Kenya, nothing like filming in Super 8 the habits and customs of Brittany.

The Haunted Mouth

1974 • 13 min • United States of America

In a haunted house, the invisible spirit of plaque - which evidently has the ability to possess rocking chairs - warns children against the dangers of not brushing and flossing.

Climb

1974 • 22 min

Climb is a 1974 short documentary directed by DeWitt Jones featuring Michael Farrell and Russell Mclean. It is about rock climbing that takes place in Washington Column. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

City Out of Wilderness

1974 • 28 min • United States of America

City Out of Wilderness is a 1974 American short documentary film produced by Francis Thompson. Produced by the United States Capitol Historical Society, it chronicles the history and evolution of Washington, D.C., from its very beginnings to the then-modern era of the 1970s. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

John Muir's High Sierra

1974 • 22 min • United States of America

John Muir's High Sierra is a 1974 American short documentary film directed by Dewitt Jones produced by Dewitt Jones and Lesley Foster. This film provides a brief geologic explanation of the development of the Sierras. It visualizes selected passages from John Muir's journal of his first trip into the Sierras in 1869 and discusses his role in conserving national parks. Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject.

Paris c'est joli

1974 • 23 min

An African immigrant finds Paris to be other than the stereotyped image of the city.

Kick the World

1974 • 16 min • Japan

Writes Kawanaka, "Video is a medium of image as well as sound. Walking on a gravel road with a camera, the crunch sound is captured in real time. Such [an] observation seems obvious, but as a filmmaker, the ability to record sound in real time was very new to me. Referencing a can-kicking game I played as a child, I followed the rolling can and recorded the resonant sounds of the can hitting the ground."

The Legend of the Old Shepherd Xeudi and His Friend Reimann

1974 • 55 min • Switzerland

In his last and only long-form film, Hans-Jakob Siber tells the tale of a hunting accident in the Alps, involving two old shepherds. Accompanied by psychedelic music of pop group The Mandrake Memorial and purely visually narrated, Siber's Xeudi is a hypnotic trip to the inner world of the old men and the mountains in which they have made their home.

Luma nocturna

1974 • 4 min

Directed by Dennis Pies.

At the Academy

1974 • 5 min • United Kingdom

A found-footage film made entirely from Academy leader, which is normally used to cue the start of films. The film was hand-printed on a home-made contact printer. It was rolled back and re-printed several times over, to create a complex layering of both image and sound.

Night of the Seal

1974 • 41 min • France

In La Nuit du Phoque ("The Night of the Seal") they "decided to try everything imaginable"; the 41 minutes are packed to the brim with wild and utterly incomprehensible visual and textual shifts, including special effects, graphic but sensual love scenes, a hilarious Busby Berkeley-style "revolutionary ballet", a superb avant-garde gay cabaret number sung by Philippe Danton – imagine a cross between Rocky Horror and the Trout Mask era Magic Band – and any number of absurd cameos (I particularly like the surprise appearance of Sir Isaac Newton, who scares the shit out of some kids playing in a local park). As a period piece La Nuit du Phoque is unbeatable, and it alone would make an impressive bonus.

Analytical Studies III - Color Frame Passages

1974 • 22 min

The film consists of seven sections: the first section, "Specimen I," a "flicker" film, is the subject for the other sections of ANALYTICAL STUDIES III. ... "Specimen I," as with most of my other works, also exists as a "Frozen Film Frame," wherein the entire footage of the film is cut into strips and aligned serially between sheets of clear plexiglas.

Flower Fields

1974 • 4 min

"This short film was intended to create a colour field painting based on the flower fields that provided the living for so many, mostly undocumented, workers in the area. When the camera closes in on the beautiful colour-striped hillside, the laborers in the field can be seen. Later, in a run up Highway 5, we see the immigration police at their mobile roadblock."

A Voyage on the North Sea

1974 • 4 min • Belgium

Marcel Broodthaers’ film and book, both titled A Voyage on the North Sea which were distributed together as part and parcel of the same publishing plot. The ostensibly related subject of both book and film consists mutually of 19th and 20th century nautical images including: 1. photographic reproductions and details of an amateur’s 19th century painting of a fleet of fishing ships and 2. photographs of a contemporary sailboat.

Vanessa

1974 • 6 min • Argentina

In documentary fashion, drag queens are shown preparing for a performance, of which clips are also shown.

The Matter

1974 • 4 min

The image and sound are being simultaneously generated from a single source, which at the same time shapes the visual pattern as well as electronic sound of the resulting signal. The potential of the Scan Processor enables the modification of the shape and scale of geometrical patterns, resulting in the creation of a new kind of "image behavior".

Splitting

1974 • 11 min

For his 'Splitting' project, Matta-Clark found a house in Englewood, NJ (322 Humphrey Street to be precise) set for demolition, and bisected it neatly down the middle. Half-documentation, half-exploration: Splitting shows the laborious process and heady result- a house split completely in two.

Moving On

1974 • 57 min • Australia

Moving On is a 1974 Australian film about a sheep farmer George Collier who moves to a county town. It was made by Film Australia to help draw attention to the problems the rural poor.

A Man Called "Bee"

1974 • 44 min • Brazil, United States of America

One of the few ethnographic films in which the anthropologist appears as one of the subjects - a lively introduction to the nature of fieldwork. Napoleon Chagnon, who lived among the Yanomamo for 36 months over a period of eight years, is shown in various roles as "fieldworker": entering a village armed with arrows and adorned with feathers; sharing coffee with the shaman Dedeheiwa who recounts the myth of fire; dispensing eyedrops to a baby and accepting in turn a shaman's cure for his own illness; collecting voluminous genealogies; making tapes, maps, Polaroid photos; and attempting to analyze such patterns as Yąnomamö village fission, migration, and aggression.

Noctiluca

1974 • 3 min • United States of America

Otherwise known as Magellan's Toys #1. Hollis Frampton's "Noctiluca" was a film designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle, the filmmaker's unfinished magnum opus work. The title (nox/luceo) means something that shines by night, i.e., the moon, and the film indeed consists of a bright sphere, sometimes white, sometimes tinted, sometimes single, sometimes doubled and overlapped.

Cycles

1974 • 10 min

Cycles brings together 16mm film with Stephen Beck’s Direct Video Synthesizer imagery via a proprietary process Beck referred to as “editation.” Beck also composed the soundtrack to the film, which is made of one sequence repeated 12 times, with both artists contributing variations on each pass.

Focii

1974 • 9 min • United Kingdom

A woman dances and mimes, her stark white image moves across a red floor, reflected in a fractured wall of mirrors. As she performs, her mirror image gradually assumes an autonomous identity so that what was a central relationship of self to self has become one self to other. Focii not only explores the construction of self, and the dynamics of self and other, but also the interaction between the viewer’s body and the body onscreen, raising questions on the nature of identification in cinema.

Underscan

1974 • 9 min

In Underscan, time and the visual image are compressed. A series of photographs of my Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, MA had been videotaped, and re-videotaped while being underscanned. (The underscanning device is a structural framework particular only to video; it compresses the picture so that the edges can be seen precisely; it does away with the variation that occurs between monitors in the amount of the image which is visible.) Because of this underscanning process, each static photo image, as it appears, changes from regular to elongated to compressed or vice versa. Excerpts from letters from my aunt spanning 10 years are condensed into 8 minutes of my voice-over audio. Certain yearly occurrences repeat in an auditory rhythm, coinciding with the cycle of yearly changes.