All Films

The Face of Jesus

1961 • 21 min • United States of America

The Face of Jesus is a 1961 English language short film directed by Merrell Gage. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

Death + Transfiguration

1961 • 10 min • United States of America

Experimental film featuring bodies and colored light.

Bagatelle for Willard Maas

1961 • 5 min • United States of America

"This is a new version of the now famous film made for her husband, the poet and film-maker. Returning from the Brussels fair, she shot this at Versailles and the Louvre. There is wit, irony and prophecy here (though perhaps not apparent to those who do not know Marie Menken and Willard Maas personally). She says only 'A more serious film than ARABESQUE, BAGATELLE attempts to synchronize into a lyric statement some observations on Versailles.' Marie Menken's fountains are the fountains of life. Marie Menken's Versailles is the Versailles of death. The beauty of this film is the alternation of the fountains and Versaille death. Only Marie Menken would have the subtlety, sensibility, sesitivity, receptivity to fuse and fetilize the classical paradoxes in such an immediate visual apotheosis." -- Charles Boultenhouse

Funtik and Cucumbers

1961 • 19 min • Soviet Union

To surprise his grandmother, the boy climbs into someone else's garden.

Dark Valley

1961 • 37 min

Hundreds of feet below the earth, three miners face death together.

In Thy Blood, Live

1961 • 18 min

Candles, tears of crying women, memories: that is how the film In Thy Blood Live begins. David Perlov's camera travels over photographs, focuses on faces that are no more, as in a gesture of parting. The history of the Holocaust is revealed in this film in a condensed, intensive way: first the memorials for the victims throughout Israel, and only then the beginning of it all - the rise of the Nazi regime, the Ghetto with its hunger and death, but with its music and theatre too, the uprising, the death camps; and it ends with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the genocide. The music of Oedoen Partos, blending Jewish, Israeli and European motives, helps portray in sounds that lost world which now belongs to memory alone

The Earth

1961 • 6 min • Yugoslavia

Short experimental 16mm film.

The House

1961 • 33 min • Netherlands

As a house is demolished, flashbacks are shown of the lives of the people who lived in it.

Playful Atom

1961 • 3 min • Brazil

An atom is launched into space. In orbit he discovers that he is a happy figure and plays until he disintegrates.

The Pocket-Knife

1961 • 9 min • Poland

A small pocket knife causes chaos in the house, and it is up to a stick man made of fruits and his trusty horse to stop him.

Primitive Paradise

1961 • 56 min

A documentary following famed explorer Lewis Cotlow traveling into the heart of New Guinea in search of unknown tribal cultures.

Baile de los Chinos

1961 • 11 min • Chile

Sequence filmed at the popular religious festival of the Virgin of Andacollo, Chile.

The Flicker Film

1961 • 4 min • Canada

‘Too esoteric, even for me,’ said McLaren about his The Flicker Film. The famous animator’s most abstract effort is marginalized to the point of being officially labelled as ‘unfinished,’ even though the explosion of high-intensity stroboscopic imagery created by rapidly alternating black and white frames, coupled to infectious syncopation on the soundtrack - looks and sounds to be not only complete enough, but utterly mind-blowing.

Impressions des Andes

1961 • 4 min • France

LIving Colour

1961 • 6 min

During the 1960s, artist Eric Olson embarked on a series of works under the title Optochromi. The vast majority of these were plexiglass objects: most were sculptures although a few are formally closer to paintings. From a cinematic point of view one could describe the Optochromi sculptures as metaphysical colour animations frozen in time – so much so that modern composer Jan Wilhelm Morthenson made his film Interferences (1966), a tribute to 1920s abstraction à la Richter, with the use of Olson’s works. Gösta Werner did something similar five years earlier with Levande färg – only that he mainly circles the sculptures, and contemplates them more than he interacts with them. A respectfully curious distance is always kept.

Espacio dos

1961 • 10 min

"I consider that Espacio dos and Tiempo dos must be considered as important works . Moreover, I affirm that, together with Tierra sin pan and Cuenca, it is the only truly important thing that has been done in Spain within the documentary genre." Javier Sagastizábal

Here and There

1961 • 25 min • Japan

Here and There (1961) fuses live-action and animation and was screened at Three-Person Animation 2. Musique concrète and electronic sounds made by modulating everyday noises such as flush toilets are interspersed throughout the work. Contrasts between opposites, as encapsulated by the title – between live-action space and animated space, between mundane sounds of daily life and bizarre noises – and the war between the sexes, a signature theme in Yōji Kuri’s work, are also palpable in the juxtaposition of musique concrète and scat singing. (CJC).

Circus at Clopton Hall

1961 • 22 min • United Kingdom

On a summer's day, a group of children improvise a circus at an abandoned farm in Suffolk.

Stad vid färdeväg

1961 • 13 min • Sweden

A potrait of Malmö, lovingly told by Gösta Werner and Nils Poppe.

Chromograms 3

1961 • 2 min • Italy

Animated drawings and photographs.

Elsa the Lioness

1961 • 30 min

First transmitted in 1961, David Attenborough travels to Meru National Park in Kenya to visit Joy and George Adamson and meet Elsa the lioness and her cubs shortly before Elsa's death.

Door to Door Salesman

1961 • 1 min • United Kingdom

Ever had a good experience with doorstep salespeople? Maybe you were lucky, but the doorstep has never seemed the best place for a sensible sales decision – which is exactly why companies use it.

Gioco di dama

1961 • 6 min • Italy

This short animated film plays on the motif of the checkerboard grid in a modernist sense, i.e. favoring the formal and graphic oppositions between the squares, the circle and the square, black and white, recalling familiar avant-garde practices.

Stories from Lakeland

1961 • 26 min • United Kingdom

A tour of the renowned Lake District; a visual delight that captures the tranquillity and drama of this quite outstanding scenery.