All Films

David Hockney's Diaries

1970 • 28 min • United States of America

Renowned English painter, David Hockney, takes us on a visual journey as he shares with us his treasured photo diaries. Consisting of polaroids Hockney has been collecting since 1967, the diaries act as both a tribute and an artist's notebook, often times including images the painter used for his large canvas works. A fine example of Hockney's pictorial inspiration are several photographs of castles he took during a boat trip down the Rhine that were later adapted for a suite of etchings to accompany six Grimm's fairy tales. Seeing his projects long before the work begins, Hockney used his camera to slow time and capture images that would go on to boast his unique style of realism. In David Hockney's Diaries the artist is seen at work on a large canvas of his friends Celia and Ossie Clark and their cat Percy, commissioned by the Tate Gallery.

Case Studies for Management No. 1: What About That Job?

1970 • 5 min

Part of BFI's "National Coal Board Collection".

Thierry

1970 • 2 min

One of the works assembled in the series Sketches. These early sketches, created not without the irony, examine ways of manipulating the video image. They indicate that the documentary trend in the Vasulkas' work was from the beginning mingled with free experimentation. These short tapes were modified from the early documentary tapes.

The Magic Tree

1970 • 10 min • United States of America

When the neglected and unloved brother Mavungu finally leaves home, he finds a tree blocking the river and frees the people imprisoned within the tree. Based on a folk tale from the Congo.

Long Live The Orgonauts!

1970 • 18 min • Italy

In the distant future, a spaceship inhabited by a group of young descendants of a "subversive" minority who escaped the destruction of the Earth, recovers a capsule in which the hibernating body of a reactionary warmonger has been preserved, who after having caused war and death, it has abandoned the now unlivable Earth. The visual experimentation aimed at the liberation of the gaze is intertwined with psychedelic visions on the one hand and with the orgone theory of Reichian memory on the other.

Bouddi

1970 • 8 min • Australia

A camera calligraphy of the coastal bush -- celebrating growth, summer light, rock and plant textures.

Unfolding

1970 • 17 min • United States of America

Through a series of dream-like episodes, UNFOLDING suggests universal awareness—aloneness, fantasies, searching, touching, loving. In the vague suggestion of a story, nature and sea mix with hints of legend, ritual, and poetry. UNFOLDING becomes one’s own folklore of imaginings. Double and triple exposure blend ocean, hills, sun, woman, and man, to portray subterranean feelings, ethereal feelings, the freeing of self, in loving and lovemaking, culminating in orgasm.

Andy Warhol and His Clan

1970 • 46 min

The film explores the personality of Andy Warhol, through his work in painting and film and through the opinions of his 'superstars'.

Delicious Catastrophe

1970 • 12 min

An intruder interrupts the monotony of life by causing disaster.

A One/Two/Many/World

1970 • 16 min • Canada

This short surrealistic film portrays a growing boy and the bizarre world of imposed conditions and contradictions he evolves in. Made by students of Queen's University, A One/Two/Many/World is social commentary expressed in symbolic language.

Lunch Money

1970 • 6 min • United States of America

Created by Walt Disney Educational and distributed to Schools

Ce que cherche Jacques

1970 • 15 min • France

A moral adventure: one sees friendships being born and being discarded, under the pressure of avowed authorities such as the family and the prejudices it states, or unavowed as the economy that no individual alone expresses.

Nude Decending the Stairs

1970 • 10 min • United States of America

The motif of having people slowly approach the camera first appears in Nude Descending the Stairs, an interesting minimalist work made up of three single-take, single-angle black and white silent rolls during each of which one person - in one instance, Huot dressed in a white painter's jumpsuit; in the others, a naked woman (Marie Antoinette) - slowly descends a four storey staircase toward the camera. Because of the camera's upward angle, the descents are translated into level forward motions during which the two people grow larger with each step they take. The film's concern with the manipulation of space and with the details of human motion through it, accounts for both the title and the inscription 'for Duchamp and Muybridge.

Es gibt schwierige Vaterländer, eins davon ist Deutschland

1970 • 45 min • Germany

Portrait of the Federal President Gustav Heinemann.

Report

1970 • 54 min • United States of America

Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, Report was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course “Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom.” The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him.

Enchanted Triangles

1970 • 9 min • Poland

This film shows various forms of triangles.

Three Frame Studies

1970 • 11 min

"In one of his earliest films, Acconci performs a series of actions — running in a circle, jumping, pushing another man — in which the physical limits of the action refer to the boundaries of the film frame itself." - Electronic Arts Intermix

Run Off

1970 • 10 min

A ten minute super-8mm work from 1970 by Vito Acconci.

Corrections

1970 • 7 min

"Unavailable until recently, Corrections is Acconci's first single-channel video. Back to the camera, with only his head and bare shoulders visible, Acconci lights a match and brings it around to the nape of his neck. The lights dim as the flame nears his body hair, which briefly flares in the darkness, at which point Acconci shakes out the match. This action is repeated for the duration of the piece. Corrections introduces themes that typify Acconci's body-based performance work of the 1970's." - Electronic Arts Intermix

Moirage

1970 • 10 min • United States of America

"A study in ocular illusions, pattern superimposition producing other patterns and illusions of three dimensionality. A thorough demonstration of the richness and varied qualities of moiré patters by the acknowledged scientist/artist Gary Oster." S.V.

Three Relationship Studies

1970 • 13 min

In the late 1960s, Vito Acconci abandoned poetry in order to work with the body and its relationship with space, although he did retain a commitment to language. Influenced by the concepts proposed by the Judson Dance Theater and the Structuralist experimental cinema in the Anthology Film Archives, Acconci shifted his interest towards performance, Super 8, video, sound and installation, executed within the gallery or museum space. Three Relationship Studies (Manipulations, Imitations, Shadow Play) brings together three conceptual exercises in which Acconci explores one of his main themes of interest: the body as space. In this particular case, he focused on the relationship of his body with the other, his manipulation of it, and the way the shadow cast by his body manages to dominate the space outside it.

Goulimime

1970 • 9 min

"...Filmed in the Sahara [...] Edited in New York at a ratio of ten to one, the movements of groups of animals in a camel market are related to establish a structural rhythm of body motions. I read Eisenstein. I ignored narrative and documentary possibilities. The sound was both wild and sync on four tracks. It augmented the visual opulence of the final footage." -N.G.

Bringing Lights Forward

1970 • 4 min • United States of America

Bringing Lights Forward describes the film set through the manipulation of lights on stands. A woman is seen placing three lamp stands at the center, left, and right of the screen and then moving them gradually into the foreground - the surface of the screen- in several distinct stages. As she makes a move she turns the lights on and off. Finally she clusters the three stands at the center of the screen but in such a way that the lamps themselves, the light source for the film, are cut off by the top of the frame yet still illuminating the screen. The woman walks off-screen once she has completed this action. The placement and movement of the lamp stands and the use of negative in this film serve as a literal demonstration of the way in which light affects the perceptual quality of the film image.

Jeanne raconte Jeanne

1970 • 21 min • France

It was while going to film Jeanne Moreau in the summer of 1970 in her house at Garde Freinet that Guy Gilles fell in love with her. She will appear in his films: "Courtyard side on the field side", then "Saint, martyr and poet". She will also sing for "Repeated absences" and "The garden that tilts".