All Films

Sing Sing

1971 • 6 min • France

Short film on the ceremony of ‘Sing Sing’ practised by Papua New Guinea’s tribes.

Drums from the Past

1971 • 12 min • France

"Tourou et Bitti", an eight minute documentary concerning a ritual in Niger, is yet another example of Rouch's excellence in creating documentaries which surpass the conventional documentary format. Just as frightening and fascinating as "Les maîtres fous", this one goes straight into the roots of ancient African cultures, in which music has an hypnotic effect, being at the same time an exorcism and a public show. Both the female and the male dancers are almost deities about to be unleashed... Spectral and humanitarian.

Black Art, Black Artists

1971 • 16 min • United States of America

Tracing the under documented history of art made by black artists since the 19th Century, this essay film explores the demands and criteria imposed on artists to confirm to established tastes and histories. Featuring artist Van Slater, the film was made by the highly influential theorist Elyseo J. Taylor, one of the first black teachers at UCLA who helped to politicise the department, bringing in Third World Cinema programme and helped to open up the school to a more diverse student body.

Door

1971 • 2 min

This is the only all-inclusive autobiography I've yet managed; and as I'm still alive, it is to be understood as a metaphor which defines the limits of expectations.

Down and Out!

1971 • 9 min • United States of America

Examples of virtually every possible way that people can fall and injure themselves.

Deck

1971 • 13 min

During a voyage by boat to Finland, the camera records three minutes of black and white 8mm film of a woman sitting on a bridge. The preoccupation of the film is with the base and with the transformation of this material, which was first refilmed on a screen where it was projected by multiple projectors at different speeds and then secondly amplified with colour filters, using positive and negative elements and superimposition on the London Co-op’s optical printer.

Shoot

1971 • 2 min • United States of America

November 19, 1971, F Space, Santa Ana, California: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend”.

Film No.1

1971 • 10 min

Film No.1 is a 10-minute loop film. The systems of super-imposed loops are mathematically inter-related in a complex manner. The starting and cut off points for each loop are not clearly exposed, but through repetitions of sequences in different colours, in different ‘material’ realities (i.e. anegative, positive bas-relief, neg-pos overlay) yet in constant rhythm (both visually and on the soundtrack hum) one is manipulated to attempt to work out the system structure … The film deals with permutations of material, in a prescribed manner but one by no means ‘necessary’ or logical (except within the film’s own constructed system/serial.)

Shepherd’s Bush

1971 • 15 min

Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film-process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure.

Chikotan

1971 • 11 min • Japan

A short animated film by Tadanaro Okamoto.

The Secrete of Life

1971 • 15 min

Filmed with hand-painted cut-out paper characters and background sets. Rated X for violence, nudity and sexual activities by paper people. "The film takes you into the repressed areas of the psyche, the dark regions of the soul. It is a trip deep into the self, beyond the limits of conventional morality where good and evil merge into one. There are no governing laws at this level of the mind and that is the terror and its fascination." -David Bienstock, Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972

Steering My Own Destiny

1971 • 6 min • Poland

A contemporary man in the eye of the cyclone created by information. He finds no support for his hands and feet. It’s like in a poem by Tadeusz Rozewicz (‘falling in every direction’), he turns to dust when his time finally comes.

Différences et répétitions II

1971 • 17 min • France

Later That Same Night

1971 • 10 min

Hindle's first all-southern-made work, filmed shortly after moving his studio from San Francisco to the lower Appalachians. Jackie Dicie sings the song in disruptive out-of-synchronization. It is Hindle's first-water attempt to express the southern country mode of existence ... the alone woman and the lonesome land. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with Pacific Film Archive, in 2012.

A Gas Film

1971 • 40 min

The film, which is about the Stockholm gasworks staying mostly at work on the so-called. chamber furnaces, where the gas is extracted from coal. It depicts both the process and some of the workers, who talk about how it is to work in the heat and dirt on the chamber ceiling. The extraction process as depicted in the film is abandoned since 1972

Wet Earth and Warm People

1971 • 59 min • Canada

This documentary by Michael Rubbo (Waiting for Fidel) offers candid glimpses of Indonesia and its people. Filming in and around the capital of Jakarta, the cameras follow where chance leads, capturing the flavour of life in this fertile crescent of tropical islands. Throughout the film, the focus is on a society caught between the past and the conflicting options for the future - to change or not to change from long-established patterns of life to ones more influenced by western technology.

The Scolding

1971 • 1 min • Spain

A political cartoon in which reformer Melquíades Álvarez faces off with monarchist Juan de la Cierva.

Hand Grenade

1971 • 8 min • United Kingdom

Experimental animation, via multiple screens.

Running Shadow

1971 • 9 min • United States of America

Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen.

Wong Singsaang

1971 • 12 min

Short film produced by Visual Communications, the United States first Asian American film production company. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Ach Viola

1971 • 37 min • Germany

Experimental feature about a woman getting involved in radical politics.

Leo Haas: Artist and Witness of His Times

1971 • 13 min • East Germany, Germany

When the Nazis took power, the Jewish artist Leo Haas (1901-1983) was arrested in his Czechoslovakian hometown. He spent the next six years in different concentration camps and became known for the paintings he did in the Theresienstadt camp. This film presents Haas as a political artist and resistance fighter and celebrates him as a socialist caricaturist dedicated to the GDR.

Where the North Begins

1971 • 20 min • Canada

“Where the North Begins” was one of the 4 original regional portrait films commissioned for the first season of Ontario Place (the others being "North of Superior" (IMAX), "Seasons in the Mind" (70mm), and "Home By The Waters" (35mm anamorphic). The film was directed by David MacKay who was the producer for "A Place to Stand" and then directed "Ontario-oh!". Although "Where The North Begins" was commissioned by the Ontario government, Dave's subversive and wicked sense of irony does come shining through, as does his heartfelt beliefs.

This Right, Left World

1971 • 21 min • Soviet Union

Based on the book “The Ambidextrous Universe” by Martin Gardner. An eccentric professor explains whether our idea of ​​the symmetrical structure of the universe is still valid and invites the viewers into the world of elementary particles