All Films

Body Tape

1970 • 4 min

1: Touching 2: Boxing 3: Feeling 4: Hearing 5: Tasting 6: Pushing 7: Walking

Don't Hustle an Ant with Muscle

1970 • 6 min • United States of America

Whilst hiding out in a house after escaping from being chased by the Aardvark, the Ant discovers a bottle of "Vitamins for Strength"; and after eating a couple of them, becomes ten times stronger than he used to be- much to the Aardvark's displeasure!

Range of Soul

1970 • 2 min

1971 Czech experimental short by Petr Skala

Neapolitan Songs

1970 • 10 min • Argentina

A mixture of abstract images and, as if out of a Man Ray painting, a large mouth in the foreground with red lipstick slowly devours a raw liver and then goes on to eat a postcard. Meanwhile, romantic Neapolitan songs play in the background. As Andrea Giunta says: At the same time they function as a hyperbole of the feminine in a register impregnated with pop aesthetics (they are perfect lips and make-up), but in which the flesh introduces an element of deep transgression, with scatological tensions.

Group IV: Beaded Light/Dissolving/Beyond

1970 • 13 min

GROUP IV: BEADED LIGHT (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) “In BEADED LIGHT, Gerson applies an ambiguous procedure to our perception of color and light.” –Bill Simon, ARTFORUM DISSOLVING (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) An ambiguous shiny grey substance at the bottom part of the frame counterpoints horizontals of clouds and fog as the camera moves up and down – shifting the perspective and therefore the space. A lone bird flies across on a perfect horizontal path. BEYOND (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) “The foreground discloses the red hair and the shoulders of a girl lying on a beach. [...] At the very end of the film, he raises the camera to a higher angle and the portions of the beach previously obscured by the girl’s form becomes visible and the two spaces – the girl and beach, foreground and background – are joined.” –Bill Simon, ARTFORUM

Treefall

1970 • 5 min • Canada

"Treefall" was originally made for a dance performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, April, 1970. Structured in the form of two loops of high-contrast images of trees falling, reprinted and overlapped. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

Dissolvimento

1970 • 9 min • Italy

Dissolvimento shows two women in domestic interiors who perform two different actions, edited one after the other. In the first, the painter Gigliola Carretti is engaged in an action with a series of sexually explicit props, making the activity resemble the brushing of teeth; in the second, the director herself is seen from behind, seated on a toilet. The film ends with the almost abstract view of cascades of the fountains of Turin.

The Quail: The Tale of a Boy Who Asks

1970 • 29 min • Iran

A short film about a boy and his bird Badbade

The Spider

1970 • 10 min • Yugoslavia

A vicious circle of violence that inevitably connects the killer and his victim.

Fairport Convention: Live in Paris

1970 • 30 min • France

Soon after Sandy Denny parted ways with the band, Fairport Convention performs at La Taverne de l’Olympia for French television's Pop2 program in 1970. Tracks include: "Walk a While," "Dirty Linen," "Sloth" and others.

Song of Destiny

1970 • 9 min • Soviet Union

We Will Meet in 1972 – In Dark and in Light

1970 • 34 min • Hungary

A television documentary about miners: the reality of their work versus how it is made to look and sound in the public sphere.

Pobal

1970 • 24 min • Ireland

A portrait of life in Ireland in the 1960s.

Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam

1970 • 13 min • Syrian Arab Republic

The construction of a dam on the Euphrates River is an example of a country’s economic development. Through grandly composed images, rhythmic editing, and aestheticized details, the director demonstrates his admiration for the interwar avant-garde. The film is a celebration of the new, while at the same time showing a traditional way of life and calling attention to working conditions; it is a refrain-like evocation of an arid country that explores the difficult lot of Syria’s rural inhabitants.

Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite

1970 • 38 min • Italy

Strains of Wagner's Das Rheingold and African tribal ululations collide with bi-/tri-sected television footage while negative-positive visuals smash heedlessly into their mirror images, an unbounded series of “meaningful” artistic fender-benders that amount to little of resonant substance.

Us

1970 • 27 min

This experimental 1970 color documentary film, ostensibly designed to provoke classroom discussion employs a boldly unconventional approach to addressing the issues of drug addiction, featuring the music of Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn. The film eschews narration for montage effects and extended fly-on-the-wall scenes of various drug users in conversation.

Portrait: Kurt Kren

1970 • 22 min • Switzerland

"This film is an attempt in focusing. I visited Kurt Kren in Vienna. (Kurt Kren is considered to be the father of the European underground film.) Kurt Showed me lots of documents, papers and letters, all about the fights he had with many restaurant owners in Vienna. But the film I made is not about these fights; I tried to focus on the eye of the hurricane, the eye of Kurt Kren. Is this Kurt Kren or isn't it?" (HHK)

Rex The Defender

1970 • 9 min • Poland

Rex is glad to see his master, a hunter. The dog has already made friends with the bunny, so he will do his best in order to save his friend. Rex protects small animals.

Passeggiata Veneziana

1970 • 11 min

Some scenes in black and white show Venice, Piazza San Marco, people who walk, feed pigeons and paint. The film records the gestures of boys hugging each other, touching each other; then childhood and provocative scenes alternate. Venice is dying.

History

1970 • 22 min

"Film in its primordial state in which patterns of light and darkness are still undivided. Like the natural order of the universe, an unbroken flow in which movement and distribution of tension is infinitely subtle, and a finite orientation seems impossible." –Ernie Gehr

Mistake

1970 • 21 min • Soviet Union

An intellectual and writer involved in underground revolutionary activity is imprisoned, where his convictions and will are put to the test. Based on Lesia Ukrainka’s short story “Mistake (Thoughts of a Prisoner)”.

Diminished Frame

1970 • 24 min

“There is a balance between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black & white, and a sense of the present in which I filmed myself showing how the colour is created by placing filters in the camera’s aperture. I searched for signs of war’s aftermath and a few moments of daily life.” - Robert Beavers

N-Zone

1970 • 46 min • Canada

Arthur Lipsett’s N-Zone is the longest, loosest and last of the collage films he produced at Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). It marks the end-point of his trajectory from feted young genius to discarded problem child/eccentric within the NFB.

Black Train

1970 • 40 min • Hungary

This shocking black and white documentary shows the lives of Szabolcs county (Northeast Hungary) commuters who traveled 200-300 kilometers from their villages to Budapest (the capital of Hungary) every week by train in the communist era.