All Films

The Salt Desert

1972 • 10 min • Mexico

Short documentary about the foundation and early years of Nezahualcóyotl, a margnialized community in the outskirts of México City.

Happening Sulla TV

1972 • 6 min

Short by Studio 970/2.

Appendice per una supplica

1972 • 10 min • Italy

[Following overview courtesy of Art Basel] Appendice per una supplica shows a pair of male and female hands against a black background gesticulating an entire repertoire of possible meanings and interpersonal tensions. The film reveals La Rocca’s attempt at developing a language that is not pre-coded by society. This dealing with the social construction of meaning was influenced by her work for Italian television, where she created and presented shows for deaf-mute persons. It is the very first film in art history showing manual gestures.

Contribution to the Theory of Linguistics

1972 • 8 min • Poland

A teenage girl describes the clash with bureaucracy and housing perturbations her parents experienced.

Tragedy or Hope

1972 • 24 min

Contrasting radical mobs, anarchy, and 1960s counterculture with footage of American manufacturing and innovation, this film celebrates the concept of American exceptionalism and argues that anti-Vietnam War protesters were influenced by communism, atheism, and immorality. Set mostly in a university library, this political debate between a medical student, his 1770s ancestor, and a history professor is a sequel to the 1972 National Education Program film, Brink of Disaster! Two additional characters appear in this drama: a 19th-century steamboat captain, and the student’s grandfather - an early 20th-century automobile worker. The National Education Program at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas created a variety of widely-distributed anti-communism films from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s.

Three Tankers

1972 • 10 min • Soviet Union

About the courage and resourcefulness of three tankers of different nationalities, who showed solidarity and protected the girl from the wolf.

Running Shadow Part II

1972 • 20 min • United States of America

Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen. Running Shadow is Fulton’s most dizzying and vertiginous film, in full demonstration of the gyrating flight simulating body-weight balance camera arm as eye he perfected. The landscape where he fully indulges in twists and turns becomes alien, with crashing waves on the soundtrack letting us know that nature always comes out on top.

Viapori - Suomenlinna

1972 • 22 min • Finland

"Antti Peippo's first documentary as a director is a different kind of tourism film of Suomenlinna fortress - a dark and gloomy portrait of a monument to totalitarianism and oppression." - Short Films by Antti Peippo DvD

James Weldon Johnson

1972 • 12 min

A biography of James Weldon Johnson whose career included music, poetry, and public service. Includes a visualization of his poem The creation, with a reading by Raymond St. Jacques. Johnson, most known for his poem, “The Creation”, was active in civil rights, and was the first Black man admitted to the Florida Bar. This biography of Johnson includes a dramatic reading of “The Creation”. Johnson wrote the lyrics to "Life Every Voice and Sing".

Tom Thumb

1972 • 7 min • Slovakia

The first animated short about Tom Thumb by Viktor Kubal

History of Manawan - Part One

1972 • 20 min • Canada

“It’s not how it used to be.” The words of Cézar Néwashish resonate throughout this short documentary that explores the history of the Atikamekw community of Manawan, Quebec. Less than a century old in name, Manawan embodies the experiences of so many Indigenous communities across Canada. Where once they practised their customs freely on a vast territory, the arrival of the Europeans would eventually mean the restriction of their cultural practices and confinement to a reserve named Manawan.

Slade Alive: Set of Six

1972 • 25 min • United Kingdom

In June 1972, Slade showcased a selection of tracks from their recently released album Slade Alive! on Granada TV’s Set of Six. This performance on Set of Six explained why Noddy Holder, Jimmy Lea, Dave Hill and Don Powell were soon tipped, by the press and fans alike, to replace The Beatles and The Stones. Slade may have looked like Fagin’s Glam ragamuffins, but as a band they delivered powerful, pulsating, exciting, entertaining and timeless Rock and Roll.

La sexilinea

1972 • 5 min • Italy

Using a line with disruptions, the artist creates a guy who thinks only of his sexuality.

Om Iii

1972 • 13 min

From the Psychedelic Series 1968-1972 / Painting on Film, Optical Printer work, Multiple exposure, pioneering techniques from Psychedelic era.

Medina

1972 • 15 min • Morocco, United States of America

An extraordinary, lucid and lyrical documentary of Morocco, unique in that it conveys both the exterior and interior values of the country. "The richest, boldest and most subtly disciplined evocation of a place that I have ever seen on film. It is as if all the impulse toward lyrical pattern had found an objective correlative in the walls, the steps, the tiles, the dense calligraphic decoration, the shaded windows and veiled eyes of the city." – Roger Greespun, New York Times

On Screen

1972 • 8 min • United States of America

Analog video was not only an alternative to more expensive motion picture film for artists. It was also a viable new medium with specific attributes all its own. In On Screen, characteristics such as video snow and audio static become more pronounced and distorted with each subsequent version of the artist within the “TV” frame. As Lynda Benglis performs a sequence of pulling faces for the camera in triplicate, we become aware that the performance is based on memory, sometimes faulty—a kind of symbiotic conflation of artist and machine.

17 Days Down the Line

1972 • 37 min

A documentary detailing a 17 day road-trip from from the east coast of America to the west.

Paris Is…

1972 • 27 min • Australia

I Want This Man

1972 • 25 min • Egypt

A woman who believes that there’s nothing wrong with the idea of ​​a woman proposing to a man, goes to a lawyer and tries to convince him of this idea and asks to marry him

The Sloane Affair:

1972 • 54 min • Canada

The investigation of a suspected tax fraud, based on actual case files of the Department of National Revenue.

Year One

1972 • 10 min • Cuba

Childcare centers and their importance in child development.

Igaku hakase Matsutsukubo Kôhei no iigaku kôza 2: Free sex

1972 • 45 min • Japan

Short pinku

The Riddle of Lumen

1972 • 14 min • United States of America

“The Riddle of Lumen” presents an evenly paced sequence of images, which seem to follow an elusive logic. As in “Zorns Lemma” the viewer is called upon to recognize or invent a principle of association linking each shot with its predecessor. However, here the connection is nonverbal. A similarity, or an antithesis, of color, shape, saturation, movement, composition, or depth links one shot to another. A telling negative moment occurs in the film when we see a child studying a didactic reader in which simply represented objects are coupled with their monosyllabic names in alphabetical order. –P. Adams Sitney. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

Lifting Safely

1972 • 1 min • United Kingdom

Health and safety animation