All Films

The World of Hugh Hefner

1973 • 53 min

This 1973 documentary by the award-winning director Tony Palmer shone a light on the multi-millionaire Hugh Hefner and his Playboy empire. It gave Hefner the opportunity to tell his story and, of course, it offended the usual suspects - Mary Whitehouse, the Daily Express and many more.

A Time For Peace

1973 • 28 min

"This film documents President Nixon's 1972 trips to the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Iran, Poland, and Austria. Highlights include the exchange of toasts by Mr. Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and the signing of five major agreements by President Nixon and Russian leaders concerning cooperation in environmental protection, medicine, space, science and technology, and the use of the seas and other commercial relations" (US National Archives).

Gli atti fondamentali. Cerimonia

1973 • 14 min

"Cerimonia" is the third chapter in the "Atti Fondamentali" (Fundamental Acts), a series of five stories each dedicated to a primary act in human life: Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, Death. The five stories, conceived as a sort of philosophical and anthropological reconstruction of architecture, first appeared, as texts, images and storyboard, on the pages of "Casabella" magazine in 1972 and 1973. The inclination to producing short stories in video was, for Superstudio, the means to explore "a propaganda of ideas, beyond the typical channels of the discipline of architecture."

First Aid Action

1973 • 21 min • United States of America

Concentrates upon basic first aid steps. Simulated situations provide an opportunity to discuss and demonstrate mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, shock, bleeding, burns, fractures, poisoning and sudden illness. A recap is made of all first aid directions. Shots of real accidents provide realism which reinforce the film’s theme. Narrated by Burt Reynolds. ACMI Identifier 003727

Genesis - Selling England by the Pound

1973 • 54 min

The fifth studio-album from English progressive-rock band Genesis.

How Fingers-Brothers Quarreled

1973 • 7 min • Soviet Union

At first, the brothers lived on the same hand together and harmoniously. But one day they found a box of jewelry, and the friendship instantly cracked. Everyone believed that it was he who deserved the most expensive jewelry.

The Heart

1973 • 10 min • France

The desperate love of a moonstruck clown for a young lady inside a stopped clock.

Berlin 1972 - Hauptstadt der DDR

1973 • 17 min • East Germany

"I'm walking through my city...", sings a cheerful pop singer. She fervently praises the new metropolis of East Berlin. As an emphatically lively, often anthemically condensed revue, the film tells of the "growth and development of our new capital". Accompanied by cheerful music, the camera indulges in high-altitude views, showing squares whose fountains, benches and green spaces are designed to make you forget that you are in a big city, as well as visitors from all over the world in top hotels. An emphatically cheerful, yet meaningful insight into the brave new GDR world.

Pulcinella

1973 • 11 min • Italy

Oscar nominated animated short from 1973. Pulcinella dreams himself into a wild nightmare of a dream that leads us through an abstract world.

30/73 Coop Cinema Amsterdam

1973 • 3 min • Austria

Kren shows the cinema (mentioned in the title) during and after film presentations. He uses single-frame and time exposures 5 to 30 seconds long. Sometimes sunlight comes through the open door into the theater changing the colors in the film remarkably. Black spots appear when the lights inside the cinema are turned off. The film is uncut and was recorded with a shoulder tripod over a period of three weeks.

O Guru e os Guris

1973 • 11 min • Brazil

A film about Maurice Legeard who run a cineclub in Santos.

Oh Yoko!

1973 • 4 min • Japan

Animation by japanese artist Keiichi Tanaami for John Lennon's song "Oh Yoko!" -- the song was released in 1971, and the animation made in 1973. Keiichi Tanaami (田名網 敬一, Tanaami Keiichi, born in 1936 in Tokyo) was one of the leading pop artists of postwar Japan, and was active as multi-genre artist since the 1960s as a graphic designer, illustrator, video artist and fine artist until his death in 2024.

Film sans caméra (F.S.C.) n°1

1973 • 11 min • France

It is a single image, produced by direct bonding on a transparent support of different adhesive products: this mono-image becomes film at the projection.

The Divine Miracle

1973 • 6 min

A surrealist translation of Catholic devotional postcard imagery set into unsettling motion. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2008.

Funny Yet Tragic

1973 • 38 min • Soviet Union

A Few Amusing Episodes from the Life of the Village of Golodranka One day, a young peasant named Stepan lost his mare, who ran off pulling a cart full of hay. Stepan spent the whole day scouring the forest roads in search of her—only to find the stubborn beast calmly standing in his own yard. Furious, he swore to chop her to pieces with an axe. Another fellow, Artyom, ran away from home to escape his quarrelsome wife. He climbed down into the deepest village well and flatly refused to come out until his wife swore never to scold or hit him again. But what truly amused the villagers—both men and women—was Roman Sotsky’s antics. With a straight face, he assured a frightened constable that the strange man who had appeared in the village was "clearly a pure-blooded Sicilist."

The Giant Brine Shrimp

1973 • 19 min

A giant brine shrimp attacks Salt Lake City, Utah. The massive creature destroys several famous landmarks and buildings before being carried away and dropped by a giant bird.

Unstable Figures Amidst Vegetation

1973 • 7 min

This film is an accumulation of semi-stroboscopic figures with features invisible to the eye, that remain in the human cerebral cortex located at the top of the brain. Nature and people are compressed and disturbed by geometric forms that struggle among themselves stroboscopically, appearing flat but transparent, penetrating the other images, causing them to contract in movements joined at the center of the screen, but more fluid at the edges. This pulsing together awakens the figures to a twofold life: mirrored and not mirrored, a result of their being filmed one frame at a time, directly, non-stop.

Odeon Cavalcade

1973 • 37 min • United Kingdom

Leave behind the ugly modern multiplex and step back into the glamorous world of the 1930s picture palace, in this charming documentary about Art Deco cinema architecture. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Oscar Deutsch created an iconic cinema brand and house style for his Odeon cinema chain. Designed by modernist architects Harry Weedon and Cecil Clavering, the distinctive buildings were anything but drab, with their sensual curves, glass, chrome and plush soft furnishings.

About Extra Hours and Volunteer Work

1973 • 7 min

Opinions of workers of the textile industry on the theses of the XIII Labor Congress of the CTC.

Whitney Commercial

1973 • 3 min • United States of America

Commissioned by David Bienstock, creator of the New American Film Series at the Whitney Museum of Art to raise funds for the second season of the series. The film was projected at the end of each program and a box to receive donations was placed at the exit of the theater. Whitney Commercial ran for two or three years until the Museum agreed to sponsor the series on its own which has continued to the present season. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

Walk-Over

1973 • 30 min

"A long narrow corridor, leading to the camera—at one side, a window—sun streams in, splotches of light and dark, the corridor shimmers. I'm at the far end—walking back and forth, humming, biding my time. Then I talk to the viewer—rather, to a specific viewer: 'So you're finally there—I've waited for you—you had to be there first.' I walk around the camera, still humming, talking now and then, but waiting till I'm close before I come down hard. I'm close up—only my lips on screen—too close, blurred: 'You want to hear about her—her hair is blonde, your hair could never be like hers—she has her own life, I'm interested in what she's thinking, we could never have had a relationship like this.' I back off, leave 'you' hanging, go back to the other end—but I come back, I don't leave 'you' alone." - Vito Acconci

Zebra

1973 • 17 min

A visual keening for the exterminated quagga. A silent dirge for lost friends, shadowed up against the wall with light from the tombs.

Relative Swingings

1973 • 10 min • Austria, Hungary

Airplane Film

1973 • 35 min

Spanning 40 years of aviation through feature clips wrenched from their cozy narrative settings, the film switches perspectives relentlessly. Pilots gaze out of windows to static shots of the earth. Air Force captains inspect the sky for enemy death machines. Desert nomads (Hollywood style) look expectantly for the winged messiah.