All Films

TV Interruptions: Tap Piece

1971 • 4 min

Ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council were broadcast, unannounced, by Scottish TV in August/September 1971. Later, seven were compiled as TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces).

Seashore

1971 • 11 min • United States of America

The basic image derives from a shot of women in (Edwardian era) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight-second loop, [Rimmer] cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over and over again... Rimmer also chose to use the forms of surface imperfections, the scratches and dirt patterns, as bases for his loops... Although working in a disciplined style of re-structuring cinematic forms, his highly orchestrated creations have inspired great admiration both from cineastes and the more general public. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

Wavelengths

1971 • 9 min • Hungary

Painted and drawn figures and shapes move to a soundtrack of rapidly changing radio broadcasts.

It's Not Time to Cry

1971 • 33 min • Chile

Through the testimony of the victims of the Brazilian dictatorship, and the re-creation of the practices to which they were subjected, the torture suffered by the Brazilian political detainees in their country is denounced. Restored version.

Self-Portrait (Asleep)

1971 • 4 min • Colombia

Experimental film inspired by Andy Warhol's 'Sleep'.

Doodle Film

1971 • 11 min • Canada

The dossier of an inveterate doodler, a man whose compulsion to put scrawls and squiggles on everything at hand brings him to no good end, according to the narrator, at least. The commentary, delivered with the perspicacity of a coroner's report, follows the development of the doodler's mania from boyhood through adolescence to manhood, when it suddenly breaks all bounds. An amusing "case history" that some of us might identify with.

Double Vision

1971 • 14 min

Campus investigates the metaphoric overlap between properties of the video camera and processes of human perception, an area of great interest to many early videomakers. Double Vision inventories strategies for comparing simultaneous images of a loft space produced by two video cameras whose signals are fed through a mixer, thus producing an electronic version of what in film would be called a "double exposure."

Catuor

1971 • 4 min

This film is about cats--actually, one very clever cat. The title is a play on the French quatuor, meaning quartet, but the chorus is not the usual alley-cat variety. The cat in this film is talented indeed. He is both pianist and piano, trumpet and trumpeter and, if need be, even becomes the music--a pulsing rock and roll--or a whole swarm of alley cats.

Camera in Love

1971 • 38 min • Netherlands

A collage of autobiography, reflections on previous work and the photographer in action. Van der Elsken tells us that he’s working on a photo book about life, from the cradle to the grave, about how people are: physical, sensuous, naked. He takes the time to show us a selection from the thousands of slides he has made during his wide-ranging travels as a photo reporter.

Dynamic Field Series

1971 • 24 min

Dynamic Field Series is made up of three elements and four distinct spaces that turn within a closed loop: the artist's body, his electronic double, the ghost of this double and beyond that, the ghost of the viewer.

Anything You Want to Be

1971 • 8 min • United States of America

A teenager's dreams collide with social expectations and gender-based stereotypes when she finds that, despite her parents' assurance that she can be ‘anything she wants to be’, reality presents another story. One of the first and most widely used consciousness-raising films of the growing Women’s Movement, this film helped give voice to a generation of women whose expectations, opportunities and career choices were extremely limited.

Si Moh, the Unlucky Man

1971 • 17 min • France

Shot in Paris after Moumen Smihi completed film school, Si Moh, pas de chance is an investigation into the lives of migrant workers in France. Connected back to the Maghreb by postcards and to his fellow migrants by shared experiences of alienation, the character Si Moh negotiates the industrialized suburbs of Paris as the subject of Smihi’s intimate camera.

The Heavy Closet

1971 • 5 min • Soviet Union

The film is about freight handler's life.

Hitchhiking: The Road to Rape

1971 • 14 min

A woman who was hitchhiking ends up in the hospital after being raped. She relives the incident in nightmarish slow-motion, questioning her choices.

Industrial Relations Bill

1971 • 4 min • United Kingdom

Experimental film responding to the controversial Industrial Relations Bill of 1971.

County Fair

1971 • 7 min • United States of America

ACI Films takes you to the county fair.

One Turkey, Two Turkey

1971 • 6 min

A musical short which purports to be about teaching children to read, using stock footage of turkeys.

Bugey pour mémoire

1971 • 7 min • France

Dutch Mountain

1971 • 1 min • Netherlands

Jan Dibbets begins with an image of the sky, then moves the camera down and films a field in undulating movements. The horizon swings diagonally and the field fills the image. With his camera movements and unusual cropping of the image, Dibbets here moulds the flat landscape into mountains.

St. Adolf II

1971 • 20 min

Art film about the painter Adolf Wolfli, 1864-1930, who was a schizophrenic patient who spent most of his life at the Waldau Institute, Bern. An attempt to view his paintings outside the context of psychotic art.

Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons

1971 • 26 min

In 1971 Thierry Zéno creates a fascinating portrait of artist Georges Moinet in the form of a 16 mm medium-length film. A schizophrenic who lives in a psychiatric hospital near Namur, Moinet paints. After being mute for 24 years he chooses this cinematic encounter to explain his artist approach, revealing what lies behind his personal cosmogony. But this long logorrhoea proves disturbing and fails to provide possible clues to understanding his work, gradually becoming a form of music that blends in with the sounds and distant, invisible hubbub of the hospital. With Alessandro Ussai behind the camera and Roger Cambier responsible for the sound, Zéno gets up close to Moinet to better capture him in all his demiurgical excessiveness, his existence on the fringes but also his humanity, deconstructing in a series of very tight shots the man and his canvasses.

Lovemaking

1971 • 13 min

A delicate and arousing treatment of lovemaking. Its mode is simple and classical, combining technical mastery and personal restraint. The image is vivid subtle and ambiguous while the sound is sharp and clear. Barlett's film, in the judge's opinion, most closely approximated their idea of what is an erotic film should be – an imaginative, suggestive, artistic, non- clinical evocation of the sexual act. – Bruce Conner, Maurice Girodias, Arthur Knight: judges at the First Ever Erotic Film Festival 1970

Thought

1971 • 7 min

In 1971 it seemed a formal companion to DOORWAY, bringing out further possibilities of small movements within the format of a continuous shot. In 1980 something sang to my current conserns, hinted at by drawing this title into that gentle sensual pulling. Something about what is moving between me, us and that out there... what us per-forming.–L. G.

War Zone

1971 • 3 min • United States of America

Sequences of war footage and artwork set to comical background music. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.