All Films

Bad-Time Story

1961 • 9 min • United States of America

Excerpts from the Bugs Bunny show compiled as a special feature for the Looney Tunes Golden Collection

The Man Without a Face

1961 • 18 min • Yugoslavia

The camera enters one of the Yugoslav prisons and records the life of prisoners. The dominating idea, above all, is that a man without freedom is a man without a face.

Étoile de mer

1961 • 19 min

Film set in Singapore

Fata Morgana

1961 • 10 min • Italy

Fata Morgana is the train that arrives in Milan coming from the south of Italy. It is the train of the “southern” migrants. They arrive with packages, luggage, wives, children, in the hope of the economic boom. But there is no place for them and the city pushes them to the periphery. Few manage to find work, but new men keep coming every day.

Burlesque Queen

1961 • 6 min • United Kingdom

Tassel-spinning showgirl Tina stars in this rare 60s British burlesque stage show reel.

Perpetuum & Mobile Ltd.

1961 • 4 min • Yugoslavia

A rather simplistic film produced in black-and-white about a worker’s troubles with the factory; with its fairly brilliant, collage-like use of cutouts of actual factory machinery.

Birds and Fish

1961 • 15 min • Yugoslavia

A display of the ancient way of fishing with birds, on Lake Dojran, the only place in the world where people are fishing with birds.

Ask Me, Don't Tell Me

1961 • 21 min

Short film documenting the San Francisco Youth for Service program.

El telegrama

1961 • 7 min

O Voo da Amizade

1961 • 14 min • Portugal

Short film by Fernando Lopes, decisive figure of the Portuguese New Wave.

Thigh Line Lyre Triangular

1961 • 5 min • United States of America

Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I've been trained to see it ( that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic–colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, as so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves... spots before my eyes, so to speak... and it's very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I've seen that every time a child was born... Now none of that was in WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such a time.

Comrade Oskar's Twelve Children

1961 • 10 min • Yugoslavia

A Little Western

1961 • 5 min • Poland

Spilling patches of colours are arranged in the form of cowboys and horses, creating a parody of the western.

London Moods

1961 • 10 min

Ken Russell is often cited as one of the fathers of the music video, with Tommy (1975) widely recognised as one of the pivotal works in the development of the form. However, as the far more obscure Monitor item London Moods from 1961 proves, he was experimenting with non-narrative illustrations of pre-recorded music fourteen years earlier.

My Beloved, Give Me a Crocodile

1961 • 7 min • Poland

Two twinlike women who live in the Stone Age want to wear the clothes that are all the rage. Birds on their heads, tigers on their shoulders and a fast crocodile as a means of transport –these are the challenges that men have to face.

The General and the Fly

1961 • 10 min • Poland

A Prussian general instructs his soldiers how to get rid of the storks bringing new lives. He turns the conscripts into cannon fodder, and he can't deal with one fly himself.

Culpability and Punishment

1961 • 12 min • Italy

For trying to seduce the boss's wife, a young delinquent is punished by gangsters.

Joseph Howe: The Tribune of Nova Scotia

1961 • 28 min • Canada

This short drama is a portrait of Nova Scotian journalist and politician Joseph Howe (1804-1873) and his battle for freedom of press. When, in 1835, Howe was accused of seditious libel, no lawyer dared defend him. Choosing to defend himself, he addressed the jury for over 6 hours, urging jurors to leave an unshackled press as a legacy to their children. Though the judge instructed the jury to find Howe guilty, jurors took only 10 minutes to acquit him - a landmark event in the evolution of press freedom in Canada.

One Woman's Opinion

1961 • 12 min • United States of America

Educational film on the funeral process.

Your Money or Your Life

1961 • 5 min • Poland

A short crime film set in a fairground.

Gado Gado

1961 • 38 min • Singapore

Wahid provides a brief account of his life beginning with his move to the city in search for employment after persuasion from his girlfriend, Rahmah. He soon finds himself caught in a host of sticky situations as he navigates towards finding steady employment. Gado Gado is one of the 91 sole-surviving Cathay-Keris Malay Classics film titles made during Singapore’s Golden Cinema era from the 1950s to early 1970s, and preserved by the Asian Film Archive. In 2014, the collection was inscribed onto the UNESCO Memory of The World Asia-Pacific Register, a list of endangered library and archive holdings. At 35 minutes long, the film is the only musical variety short from the Cathay-Keris catalogue.

Lieverdjes

1961 • 6 min

An impression of schoolkids in Amsterdam: in the canal boat, in Artis Zoo at the monkeys and swimming in the canal.

Duel

1961 • 9 min • Hungary

Cannes Jury Prize-winning short film.

Karel Appel, Composer

1961 • 16 min • Netherlands

In 1960, Utrecht University took over the Studio for Electronic Music from Philips. In this studio in Utrecht, composers and artists worked on their own compositions. In 1961, Jan Vrijman made a film about Karel Appel, De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, and Appel himself made a musical composition for this film in the studio in Utrecht. Van der Elsken films and photographs Appel during the composition of his Musique Barbare, as well as recording conversations on tape; the film is in fact a kind of collage of film, photographs and sound. As well as an exceptional record of Karel Appel’s working process, this film is a unique documentation of the studio and therefore a significant piece of Dutch musical history.