All Films

Mephisto’s Little Film Plays

1973 • 18 min • United States of America

Compilation of short animated films made by children ages 7-18 at the Yellow Ball Workshop in 1974. Paper cut out, flip card, and live action with drawing on film techniques employed.

The Resourceful Hare

1973 • 10 min • Soviet Union

The story of how a cunning rabbit tricked a formidable lion.

Such Stories

1973 • 14 min • Soviet Union

About the adventures of three funny little men.

Fforest Bay

1973 • 6 min

The location is a small bay in Wales, this bay faces due north over the Irish sea. It has high ground to the east and west and low ground to the south. At its mouth it measures about a quarter of a mile from one side to the other. From the mouth to the beach, at the southernmost point, it measures half of a mile. The distance between the high and low tide mark on the beach is about 100 yards during spring tide. The tripod was placed at an angle of 60 degrees to the horizontal plane midway between the two sides of the bay and at the waters edge. The camera panned through 360 degrees stopping every 45 degrees to take a predetermined number of frames. The shooting speed was one frame per second.

The Longest Drink

1973 • 50 min

Don Haworth's documentary film considers the water story so far, from the raindrop through a great industrial city to the sea, from the Victorians' first brash floodings of country valleys to the politics of meekness and the technology of electronic gadgets. It also follows the people who work with water - from the low paid but leisurely "reservoir keepers," to the engineers, tunnellers, maintenance men, and water testers, to the beleagured mobile water man, who it appears spends much of his day getting it in the ear from the good people of Manchester.

Art, Life and Opinions: Sawako Gōda

1973 • 25 min

In this documentary made by Yoji Kuri, artist Sawako Gōda talks Kuri through the development of her best-known works and the origins of their distinctly Gothic sensibility, including her assemblages of junk and debris picked up in Tokyo and New York, her painted copies of antique foreign photographs, the quickly-produced painted eggs which became her signature, and the sculptures she made from a horse skeleton which she helped to flay herself. Gōda’s commentary on her artistic practice is interwoven with reflections on the practical demands of her life: from the challenges of living abroad and of raising her child as a single mother, to how financial circumstances helped to shape the appearance and form of her objects.

The Trip

1973 • 12 min • Japan

A woman taking a trip encounters a nightmarish landscape juxtaposed against scenes of classical beauty.

Medea

1973 • 7 min • United States of America

Ben Caldwell’s Medea, a collage piece made on an animation stand and edited entirely in the camera, combines live action and rapidly edited still images of Africans and African Americans which function like flashes of history that the unborn child will inherit. Caldwell invokes Amiri Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doctrine” in this experimental meditation on art history, Black imagery, identity and heritage.

Children at Work

1973 • 10 min • Ireland

Children learn through play in Irish Montessori schools in the 1970s, accompanied by voiceover explaining the Montessori method and jaunty jazz flute. The three schools featured in Páistí ag Obair are Tigh na nÓg, Blessington; St Kieran’s School, Bray; and The Children’s House, Stilllorgan. Oscar Nominee: Best Documentary Short, 1974

...Remote..... Remote....

1973 • 10 min • Austria

With sometimes painful directness, Valie Export conducts a psychological investigation of the body in this film performance, externalizes an internal state. In front of a police photo showing two children who were sexually abused by their parents, she tortuously cuts into her cuticles until blood drips into a bowl of milk on her lap. On top of the symbolic plane of blood and milk, the physical effect on the viewer of her destructive act of self-mutilation is extreme.

Mind How You Go

1973 • 12 min • United Kingdom

Valerie Singleton shows children of primary and middle school age how they can cross the road safely by following the Green Cross Code.

The Most Learned Hare

1973 • 15 min • Soviet Union

How knowledge helped the hare and his friends.

Migrantes

1973 • 7 min • Brazil

Director João Batista de Andrade was filming a documentary about migrants coming from Northeast Brazil to São Paulo in search of a better living. His intention was to give voice to these underprivileged and homeless people. While preparing to interview a man who lived under a bridge, a passer-by interfered, starting an argument about the role of people from other states in the development of São Paulo and the rural problem in the Northeast.

Watching for the Queen

1973 • 11 min

Watching for the Queen continued Rimmer's investigations of minimal narrative and the anonymous/autonomous shot. Pattern recognition, saccadic eye movement and feature rings are well known phenomena in the behavioral sciences. However, in Watching for the Queen, Rimmer has succeeded in employing these mechanisms in the telling of a story, by employing mathematical ordering in an aesthetic manner. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

La parole en deux

1973 • 12 min • France

Face-Off

1973 • 33 min

Face-Off is an ironic collusion of private and public, of exposure and masking, a tense ritual wherein Acconci divulges and then censors his self-revelations. Acconci turns on a reel-to-reel audiotape recorder and bends down to the speaker to listen to it, his face barely visible in the frame. The audio is a recording of his own voice addressing himself and the viewer, recounting intimate details about his life. However, whenever the material becomes too personal, he tries to drown out his voice and prevent the viewer from hearing, yelling: "No, no, no, don't tell this, don't reveal this...." Reacting to his recorded voice, he becomes increasingly agitated as the tape proceeds.

The Big Stick / An Old Reel

1973 • 10 min • United States of America

Saul Levine spent six years (from 1967-1973) cutting up and re-editing 8mm prints of two Charlie Chaplin shorts, IN THE PARK and EASY STREET, into a dynamic yet dreamy deconstruction of physical and narrative movement. What begins with Chaplin looping around in circular repetitions between a cop and an ominous vagrant becomes more fractured as the film expands. News footage of police arresting protesters (shot from a television screen on black-and-white 8mm film) is cut into the comedy of cops and criminals (a shot of political reality amidst slapstick fantasy) and images are abstracted by rapid-fire cutting. Even the physical cuts on the celluloid become part of the image as Levine chops through the frames themselves, leaving broad gashes on the screen and fracturing images until they overlap with the next shot and the suggestions of narrative are whirled into a frenzy of motion.

Insane Night

1973 • 3 min

1973 Czech experimental short by Petr Skala.

The Adventures of Ivashka

1973 • 14 min • Soviet Union

About the bear cub's first acquaintance with the outside world.

Moffitt Building Piece

1973 • 3 min • United States of America

Considered to be the first of Ana Mendieta's video, performance and film based pieces responding to the death and murder of Sara Ann Otten on March 13 of 1973.

Red Agate

1973 • 24 min • Soviet Union

Young girl is looking for the rare red agate which she believes will cure her grandfather.

The World of Lygia Clark

1973 • 25 min • France, Brazil

Artistic experimental documentary short that explores the universe of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Sensorial experiences, the perception of the body, forms and tactile sensations are mixed and reflect the human race as part of the cosmos, getting lost to find itself. Art, stripped of its virtuous image, as an action of the common human being, the expression of living things, runs from the mechanical repetition of movements and attitudes.

Sweating Blood

1973 • 3 min

Single channel, super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent.

98.3 KHz (Bridge at Electrical Storm)

1973 • 10 min • United States of America

A repeating journey across the San Francisco Bay Bridge becomes a journey into disintegrating visuals, video transformation, with an accompanying sound track taken from "40 years of Radio". As a film, it anticipated the end of the film medium, and the emergence of the video medium.