All Films

The trace is similar to the index, but there is a more complex relationship to the original referent because the trace is at once a repetition and an erasure. In his 1974 film The Portrait of Père Tanguy, Goldstein traced a reproduction of the famous Vincent van Gogh painting of the same name. While on the one hand Goldstein's presence is affirmed by the mark which he makes on the paper, on the other, his sense of selfhood or individual identity is called into question by the fact that he is merely tracing an image produced by another individual, an image originally intended to assert van Gogh's individuality and sense of selfhood. The repetition is compounded by the fact that the tracing is, in fact, a tracing of a reproduction so that we are faced with a seemingly endless trail of doubling and disappearance.

This adventure film features Scott McVay, an authority on whales, and filmmaker Bill Mason. The objective was to film the bowhead, a magnificent inhabitant of the cold Arctic seas brought to the edge of extinction by overfishing. With helicopter and Inuit guide, aqualungs and underwater cameras, the expedition searches out and meets the bowhead and beluga.

An animated quickie to get you in the swing. Three animated figures, a man, a woman and a child, dance, arms and legs flying, to the compulsive rhythms of this Bossa Bop. It's a light film in a carnival mood, and who can remain still when the music commands?

A dead tree. A body. Ocean waves.

The 'climates' of this film allude to the relationships of a couple. Atmosphere and moods are induced by watercolour designs, mostly washes, suggesting landscapes through which faces and figures appear. The effect is dreamlike, an ebb and flow of colour, form and line, to the accompaniment of music. The animation is largely of textures rather than of design, washes of colour that come and go to the bidding of the music or the whim of the artist.

A man meets a childhood friend who does not recognize him.

The Central Finger (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974).

Short movie by Luca Maria Patella.

An Angry Dog is a hand-held animation made from a Cracker Jack toy.

‘A cook can’t just mix things up’, says a woman with a typical Brooklyn accent while the camera shows sophisticated images from food and travel magazines. In this black-and-white video, her first in this format, Martha Rosler explores the relationship between gastronomy, class and breeding. A silhouetted woman hiding her face from the camera describes her efforts to improve her status and that of her family through gastronomy. With a deadpan voice and accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, the woman explains why she wants to become a gourmet. The text comes from one of Rosler’s ‘postcard novels’ entitled Budding Gourmet – also written in 1974 – in which in eleven chapters the artists tells the story in the first person of a woman wanting to learn haute cuisine to climb the social ladder.

The performance takes place in a small setting with an audience, but that's only a part of the artwork. After filming the performance he uses them again in installations where he is Miss Piggy or Heidi. And of course lots of ketchup, Mayonnaise and chocolate sauce.

Because of work commitments and the influence of Christian Missions, traditional mourning ceremonies among the Tiwi people of Melville Island were becoming rare at the time of making this film (1974). The full, elaborate ceremony, called the Pukumani ceremony, lasted several days and involved large numbers of people in ritual roles. It was performed here with full awareness that this may be one of the last times such a ceremony would be staged in the traditional way. The ceremony was prepared by the Mangatopi family of Snake Bay after the death of a 35-year old family member killed by his wife. The dead man’s father, Geoffrey Mangatopi, and his family requested this film to be made as a public record of a disappearing tradition. Unique to the Tiwi people of Melville and Bathurst islands, the Pukumani ceremony was not only performed to safe-guard the passage of the dead person into the spirit world, but to re-affirm kinship relationships and traditional Tiwi culture.

Short movie by Douglas Davis.

A remarkable film diary comprised of photographs of the protests at the Nihon University All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee (Nichidai Zenkyōtō) and film fragments depicting everyday life.

A chance meeting between the artist, ten young boys, and a yo-yo champion in a drugstore parking lot provides the substance for this rambling and anarchic filmed interview that at once parodies “man on the street” television interviews while introducing and sustaining an unusual but deliberate verite technique on its own.

This film centers on the construction of a traditional style house, their houses being not only very distinctive but also figuring prominently in religious ritual. The houses were rectangular and pole-framed, thatched with Miscanthus or bamboo-leaf; the doorway was protected by a skin or woven hanging and various parts of the house, such as the hearth and a window on the eastern side, would serve ceremonial purposes.

Nostalgia for the past. The film is about new relationships that undermine the traditions of the patriarchal village.

Viracocha features mestizos and campesinos in the Andean highlands interacting within a near-subsistance economic system. Market days and fiestas provide opportunities for Spanish-speaking mestizos, alternately benign and abusive, to assert their traditional social dominance over the Aymara and Quechua campesinos.

This film is my response to the epic tradition, from Homer to the Mahabharata–V. G. “This film reflects everything (Grauer) has been involved with in his previous films and he uses this knowledge in a highly personal and non-mechanical way. No matter how well previous type of 'flicker' film is done, they essentially remain machine-like and impersonal. In BOOK, Grauer extends his vision to encompass much more.... The totality of the experience is a kind of wrap-around poem... None of the parts exist by themselves, everything is interwoven to produce a strong and hypnotic unity."– Bob Cowan, in Take One

John Cleese was elected rector of St Andrews in 1970. Here, he walks about the university town, passing a few humorous comments on its institutions.

The result of a three year collaboration [1971-1974] between the Resolution film group and a number of community groups struggling to save their home and neighborhoods from "urban renewal". In San Francisco, as in most other cities, "urban renewal" means destroying minority and working class neighborhoods and building lucrative luxury developments. As usual, the key government people have been bought and paid for by the big developers. Redevelopment is a "tool" not in the "here's how to fix it" sense, but rather as an aid to understanding local issues in the larger contexts of the political-economy of the city and a variety of community organizing strategies. The film has been used and enthusiastically received by community and tenants' groups all over the country. It has proven itself as an effective means of stimulating discussion in the neighborhood and the classroom.

Two pumpkins.

Documentary outline about conscripts, their difficult military exercises in the Soviet army.