All Films

Nikolai Slichenko

1969 • 56 min • Soviet Union

This documentary is devoted to the work of theatre and film actor and singer Nikolai Slichenko. Since 1977, he has been the artistic director of Moscow's Romen Theatre, the oldest professional Romani theatre in the world.

Processions

1969 • 18 min • United States of America, Vietnam

This film explores how the conflict with the North affects "South Vietnam's traditional culture, and seeks to explain why the South Vietnamese people still have the will to fight. Included in the film are a funeral procession, family life scenes, fishermen and farmers at work, soldiers moving single file along a dike, and a wedding procession" (US National Archives). A binational production between the United States and the (former) Republic of South Vietnam.

Archimedes

1969 • 1 min • Romania

Cutout animated advertisement for the "Mamaia" fruit nectar, distributed by Conservexport București.

Festa grande di Maggio del territorio padovano consacrato al cuore di Maria Santissima

1969 • 24 min

Images of everyday life: a walk, the village fair with the carousel and children playing alternate with scenes in which the young couple kisses passionately in a little church, spied by the indiscreet eye of the camera.

Fractions of Temporary Periods

1969 • 48 min • Italy

To me, to go to the window and look outside is like watching a film. Filming is a way to draw out the condition of spectator and alienate it. I made this film very instinctively, naturally. Now I am beginning to learn to watch it. The very idea of something that moves, like a bird in flight… movement. The sensation of an object in space, like the light on a screen… space. The speed of the sun… time… the opposite of an image or perhaps its absence/essence. Some advice: go see a good Hollywood film: a melodramatic, sentimental story. (P. Bargellini)

Por primera vez

1969 • 9 min • Cuba

In 1967, Cuban documentary filmmaker Octavio Cortazar followed a travelling projectionist troupe whose mission was to show moving pictures to rural communities for the first time. Cortazar’s short film documents one audience’s response to its first film: Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

T,o,u,c,h,i,n,g

1969 • 12 min • United States of America

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G uses flickering frames of solid color juxtaposed with positive and negative still images of a man—sometimes cutting off his own tongue with glitter-covered scissors, sometimes suffering a series of glitter-stained fingernail scratches across the face. Other rapidly alternating still images of eye surgery and a couple in the midst of intercourse. The soundtrack is a continuous looped recording of the word "destroy" over the entire length of the film.

Blake

1969 • 19 min • Canada

An eccentric history buff lives in a cabin in the woods but spends most of his time flying his biplane.

Vite

1969 • 33 min • France

In 1969, the painter-sculptor Daniel Pommereulle made his third film, this one financed by Sylvina Boissonnas. Although only a short, Vite was one of the most costly of all the Zanzibar productions. It features, for instance, shots of the moon taken by a state-of-the-art telescope, the Questar, that Pommereulle first saw while visiting Marlon Brando in southern California in 1968. In Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, Pommereulle and his friend Adrien philosophize on how best to achieve le vide (emptiness) during their summer holidays. Three years later, Pommereulle would transform the word “vide” to “vite” (quickly), signifying his profound disenchantment with the aftermath of the revolution of May ’68. —Harvard Film Archive

Cibernetik 5.3

1969 • 8 min

John Stehura's spectacular film Cibernetik 5.3 combines computer graphics with organic live-action photography to create a new reality, a Third World Reality, that is both haunting and extraordinarily beautiful. Cibernetik makes use of realist imagery for its nonobjective qualities and thus impinges directly upon the emotions more successfully than any computer film discussed in this book. -Gene Youngblood

Screen

1969 • 4 min

16mm film installation.

Highways of Agony

1969 • 28 min • United States of America

An ultra-grim Highway Safety Films title, thanks to narration that’s even more dour than usual and a chilling musical score by Hungarian composer Zoltan Rozsnyai. This is not the TV series, "Emergency!" These are real people who are hurt. You not only get a glimpse of the gory results of accidents; you see emergency care before the paramedics came into vogue (1969). Miami rolled out the first paramedics that year while Los Angeles County (basis of "Emergency!), along with Portland, began providing street medicine.

The Battle Of Khe Sanh

1969 • 29 min • United States of America

A film recounting Khe Sanh, often considered the most important battle of the war.

Scenes from Under Childhood, Section Two

1969 • 40 min • United States of America

In Section II we see a series of discrete sequences showing the children, now somewhat older, in different types of play. They manipulate tiny objects, doll furniture and miniature figures, dress up in costume, play outdoors, watch TV. We see them eating, sleeping, crying . . . A repeated image in this section, used both alone and in superimposition, is a moving, glittery golden dazzle which resembles tinselly pinpoints of light. There are golden dazzle images that look more like small bubbles than pinpoints. These glitter images, along with the occasional solid color frames, are recurrent threads connecting the separate sequences of this section. (Artforum)

Tädi Rose

1969 • 26 min • Soviet Union

Works and Days

1969 • 12 min • United States of America

By stripping the sound from a pre-existing instructional film, Frampton conjures, with an economy of means, the everyday movements then being explored by the Judson Dance Theater. "I bought this film in a Canal Street junk shop for $1.00 and found myself in complete agreement with it. The ostensible pretext is the humane and practical discipline of making a vegetable garden (hence the title, borrowed from Hesiod). The gardeners are masters of their art, so that their work blossoms into overarching metaphor." —HF.

A Day in the Death of Donny B.

1969 • 14 min • United States of America

A portrait of a strung-out heroin addict scrambling through New York City to score some cash for his next fix.

Picture to Post

1969 • 23 min • United Kingdom

The film explores the design process of postage stamps and the work of three notable designers, Arnold Machin, Jeffery Matthews and David Gentleman.

Death May Be Your Santa Claus

1969 • 37 min • United Kingdom

Frankie Dymon's Death May be Your Santa Claus (1969), arguably Britain's first and only example of a 'black power' movie, in which themes of sexual and political identity encircle one another in the context of a hip and hippy London of the late 1960s, suspended between the cinematic radicalisms of films such as Roeg's Performance, Godard's Sympathy for the Devil in which Dymon played a leading role, or Boorman's Leo the Last. Thought lost until quite recently, this inscrutably-titled film is described as a 'pop fantasy' and offers an intriguing look at 60s sex and politics from a black British perspective.

Spot the Microdot

1969 • 10 min • United Kingdom

This film was made by punching circular holes into fully opaque film stock and laying discs of colour film into some of the punched holes. Only the original copy of this film exists – it cannot be printed and is therefore projected only on rare occasions. As with other Le Grice films from the late 1960s, Spot the Microdot is marked by a radical rejection of ‘illusionism’, choosing to focus instead on the material properties of the film medium itself.

Tracce di tracce

1969 • 7 min • Italy

Executed and printed with two hands, that is to say, made using all possible means of imprinting the right and arm freshly applied ink, sand paper, stamps, etc. Everything was done on non-emulsion clear leader.

Technology, Phooey

1969 • 6 min • United States of America

Aardvark's computer contraption that he consults for advice on how to catch the Ant only guides the Aardvark through an exercise of painful futility.

A Walk

1969 • 3 min • Argentina

A walk in a wheat farmland in the a village. While moving between the tall sheaves, the walker’s restless eye surveys the fields, the cattle, and settles on the faces of the residents of the small town. Brief animation exercises repeat, and the sketch the figure of a contemplative walker.

L'autre scène

1969 • 6 min • France

In L'Autre Scène, the images and the sound material try to manifest the mechanism of an advertisement around the blade.