Discover Movies

An exploration of the musical and social origins of the blues, shot on location in Mississippi in 1978 by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in association with the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television and broadcast on PBS in 1980. This re-release in 2009 includes two hours of additional music.

Dusty Springfield is Britain's greatest ever pop diva and the possessor of one of the finest and most soulful voices of all time. She dominated both the UK and US charts throughout the sixties with a string of hit singles that have stood the test of time as true classics. Originally a member of the folk trio The Springfields, from whom she took her stage name, she became a solo artist in 1963 after being exposed to the magic of Motown whilst playing in America and became probably the finest ever white soul singer. Diagnosed with breast cancer in the mid-nineties she died in 1999 at the age of just 59. This concert, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 1979 in the presence of HRH Princess Margaret, captures Dusty at the height of her career. The show is packed with hits (including 9 UK top 10 singles), which are delivered with all the glitz and panache that were Dusty's trademark and have made her a major gay icon as well as beloved of music fans everywhere.

Neil Diamond gives a powerful and memorable performance at the packed Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in 1976, perhaps one of Neil’s great years. The show takes us back to a memorable time in pop music and in Neil Diamond’s career - while also giving us music that is as fresh and timeless today as it was then. The early hits are here, in rousing and intimate interpretations: ‘Cherry, Cherry,’ ‘Song Sung Blue,’ ‘Sweet Caroline,’ ‘I Am...I Said,’ ‘Cracklin’ Rosie,’ and more. But Neil also introduces songs from what was then his new album - and is now considered a classic - the benchmark ‘Beautiful Noise,’ produced by rocker Robbie Robertson. And Neil gets across the footlights, bringing the big audience to its feet, inciting clapping and singing along, and pulling two of the best-known stars of the era, singer Helen Reddy and the actor Henry Winkler (then an icon as TV’s ‘Fonzie’) up on stage to sing with him. An amazing trip back in time with one of our most enduring singers.

The story of two friends who become heroes. Was Joe’s courage based on faith or foolishness? Pete wasn’t sure, but there was no turning back. Two teenagers struggle together to rid their neighborhood of the evils of drug use in this award winning action drama. Inspiring and entertaining for all ages.

“Serial Metaphysics — a thirteen-minute experimental 16mm film which has been described as 'an examination of the American commercial lifestyle, recut entirely from existing television advertisements' — was edited by Dixon himself, on a single night, New Year’s Eve 1972, culled down from 72 hours of American TV commercials. The film is a fever dream as seen through our existing television advertisements, foreshadowing for hopeful future generations a promised future life of happiness and security in the land of plenty.

Slated for inclusions on the Boston based Infinity Factory educational program alongside Map Projections, Digging to China explores a familiar childhood activity on a global scale.

A shepherdess loses her sheep and Hoot thinks Crazywolf stole them, so he's off to get him. Unfortunately, Crazywolf is a practical joker and catching him is harder that he thought. First "Hoot Kloot" cartoon.

Short Animation

The path of righteousness is a stony one. And Lo! for Daniel it is stonier than most.

Three showgirls on their way to Las Vegas have stuck all night when their car breaks down. The next morning ,a man offers them help, but, he's really a maniac.

A contemporary comedy-drama set against the background of rich southern elegance and the permissive swinging singles society of today. A successful young stockbroker, whose business is financed by his father-in-law, is frustrated by his wife's coldness. When an old friend from college, who teaches tennis to attractive young women and bored housewives, suggests that the stockbroker seek solace outside his marriage, the stockbroker begins an affair with his secretary. Meanwhile, the stockbroker's wife has an affair with her husband's old college friend.

Detective Ellery Queen has to solve a series of murders where the victims were killed in numerically descending ages, the male victims were strangled with blue cords and the female victims with pink ones.

Sexploitation comedy about an aspiring artist. Alan and Sue switch roles: she goes out to work while he looks after the home and concentrates on his painting. However, he fails to anticipate the time-consuming attentions of various female neighbours.

Produced collectively by women, this documentary is a valuable historical document of the origins of the modern women's movement in the United States. The film delves into the lives of ordinary women from different races, educational levels and social classes. Filmed mostly in small consciousness-raising groups, from which the women's movement grew, the women talk about the daily realities of their lives as wives, home-makers, and workers. They speak, sometimes with hesitancy, often with passion, about the oppression of women as they see it.

Nearing her 20th birthday, a young girl decides to "get over with" losing her virginity before her teen years are over.

Easter service takes place in the Russian Orthodox church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Montréal. The depth of emotion touched by this ancient ceremony is reflected in the film. Filmed in the shadowy, taper-lit space, sonorous with chanting voices, and coloured with occasional views of the icons and frescos, the film shows an absorbing religious experience.

A couple gets intimate in the privacy of their home, but a neighbor's daughter accidentally witnesses, leading to a court trial on Sexual Liberty in Private.

A race-car driver finds himself in a romantic triangle and a machete-swinging stranger trying to kill him.

The film attempts to construct a space (as all films do), to construct a time (as all films do), to construct a process (as all films do) of and for viewing, of and for the viewer to constantly re-process, re-memorate, re-produce it (him/her) self in attempted (but impossible) arrestation. Thus the impossibility, through such a practice as this film, 4th Wall, of a seamlessness, a linear narrative flow, a pleasure of the sort so sought for as in its delirium it reestablishes in all its power the ideology of meaning making. The secure place for the finding of meaning in representation is that secure place: of sexist power, of the ideology of transparency, meaning/consumption in the guise of 'meaning making', the catatonic hysterical statis of/for the viewer, given more and more as the 'position of the subject', etc, a new ideology of freedom, which must be countered (again, a defence) with another ideology; this.

TANNHÄUSER UND DER SÄNGERKRIEG AUF WARTBURG is a grand opera by Richard Wagner in three acts. After experiencing boundless sensuality and freedom with the fun-loving Venus (soprano), the singer Tannhäuser (Tenor) finds it impossible to conform to the cultured setting of his betrothed Elizabeth (soprano), who loves him. During a singing contest, Tannhäuser describes the affair with Venus as the ultimate love experience and because of that, he is cast out from the established society. Thanks to Elizabeth's intervention, he is allowed to undertake a pilgrimage to the Pope to ask for the Holy Father's pardon. If the Pope accepts to forgive him, he would be allowed to take back his place in society. Tannhäuser accepts. But fate will not allow him to meet with his beloved Elizabeth again in this life. This is a recording of the legendary staging by Götz Friedrich for the 1978 Bayreuth Festival conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

"What is art?" The film offers some new answers to the age old question.

Norma Jean Baker finds her way to Hollywood and is turned into sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.

This film takes its cue from that ultimate situation of Sex/Med/masturbation - the loft-and-lonely hotel room. It is thus easily twice the length and complexity of any other in the series.

Workers from a maintenance crew hammer railroad ties along the Louisville and Nashville line, filmed by Tav Falco. Music: “Bourgeois Blues,” by Tav Falco & Panther Burns.

TV Garden is Paik’s imagined future landscape where technology is an integral part of the natural world. Placing television sets amongst live plants, he creates an environment in which the seemingly distinct realms of electronics and nature coexist. His approach follows the Buddhist philosophy that everything is interdependent. It also suggests that technology is not in conflict with nature but an extension of the human realm.

Two bratty lovers decide to pull the old screw-and-switch on their difficult parents.

An experimental short by Hollis Frampton who films the female form during various activities.

An account of a 1975 independent truckers strike.

This horrific dramatization of the Guyana tragedy traces the steps of Reverend Jim Jones, a highly charismatic, but profoundly paranoid clergyman, who after years of evangelism and good deeds, begins his own church in the mid-western United States. When Jim Jones becomes increasingly obsessed with the belief that the CIA is "a wicked enemy" who is out to get him, he emigrates with his congregation to Guyana, where he plans to create a utopia. But Jim Jones' utopia consists of a society where he demands his followers turn their minds, bodies and possessions over to him, one that is rife with orgies, physical violence, mental torture, and sexual abuse of children and adults. Ultimately, Jim Jones' paranoia reaches a fevered pitch that culminates in him taking savage action against his own congregation. (VCI Home Video)

While related in technique and effect to its predecessor DANCE NINE, it serves as more of a summation of Doris Chase's varied involvements with dance and the arts. The artist employs fully the most sophisticated video technology available to manipulate forms, patterns and colors . At the same time, choreographer/dancer Kei Takei has designed her movements to blend with one of Chase's large kinetic sculptures. The delighting opening sequence shows Kei Takei actively exploring the arch-like forms which, through video feedback techniques, take on a rainbow appearance of multi-hued images.

Mosha Michael's third film follows six Inuit hunters from Frobisher Bay, N.W.T. setting out on a spring whale hunt. Once again, Michael documents the process on Super 8 film, from pushing the canoes out over the thin spring ice to open water, to the killing and cleaning of the whale and storing the meat. An original score features music and songs in Inuktitut by the filmmaker himself.

John Cleese stars as Sherlock Holmes in this Comedy Playhouse pilot episode from 1973.

Early short film directed by Gillian Armstrong.

A Marine on leave from Vietnam becomes involved with hippies, communes and drug-running.

Portraying Ayub Kalule, the boxer from Uganda who was "the most famous immigrant in Denmark" in the late 1970s.

taiwan film

Three former victims of incest relationships with their fathers speak openly about their experiences, their feelings and their psychological adjustment.

A 14-minute almanac of Midwestern America and its funky Americana at the end of the Love Generation, Love It / Leave It begins with proudly naked people parading about for all the world to ogle at the annual Naked City beauty pageant in Roselawn, Indiana, before returning to Chicago, where families literally draped in American flags are found wilting under the heat of the sun along a downtown parade route.

Small town gal Wendy resorts to prostitution after moving to New York City. Wendy gets busted by corrupt vice cop Vince and winds up spending 90 days in jail. In the wake of finishing her sentence, Wendy decides to quit working the streets by owning and operating her own brothel instead.

This oddball counterculture comedy/drama follows Zalman King through a series of kooky misadventures while he searches for his life's purpose in New York City.

Pinku from 1975.

This improvised film is based on the true-life suicide of TV personality Art Linkletter's daughter, Diane. Mr. and Mrs. Linkletter fret about their daughter's recent behaviour, which includes taking drugs and dating a lowlife named Jim. Eventually, the parents confront Diane… with tragic consequences.

In an intense, personal discussion, three gay men share their first sexual attitudes and experiences, feelings about men, women and children: about labeling, intimacy; and about first accepting, then becoming proud of being gay. They urge the freeing of all people; from labels and from compulsive sex--into a new intimacy.

Traces life in USA from the first Native Americans to the Bicentennial.

Aspiring dancer Phyllis Dixey makes her name as a stripper.

This entertaining film documents the first ascent of the very difficult South Face of Annapurna, a huge Himalayan wall that the right team could achieve the seemingly impossible. The ascent of the South Face of Annapurna in 1970 was one of those breakthrough ascents - both technically and psychologically. Chris Bonington assembled the cream of British mountaineering and American Tom Frost for the attempt. The documentary is punctuated by wry observation, understatement and cutting humor from a by-gone age when the game of taking huge risks was matched by a determination not to take it too seriously.

Two unforeseen problems meant that many fans consider this the weakest Christmas special. Firstly, Talbot Rothwell became ill whilst writing the script, and was unable to finish it. Dave Freeman had to be brought in to complete the script, but the two men did not work together. As a result, the script does not flow as easily as the earlier offerings. Secondly, Charles Hawtrey pulled out of the special at short notice. Having taken third billing to Sid James and Terry Scott in the previous two shows, and knowing they would both be absent, Hawtrey demanded top billing. But Carry On producer Peter Rogers refused, giving top billing to Hattie Jacques instead. Hawtrey's role had hastily to be recast, and was split between Norman Rossington and Brian Oulton, both of whom had played cameo roles in several Carry On films. The special featured a collection of historical sketches, loosely linked around an 18th-century banquet.

A conflicted teen lashes out by vandalizing equipment at the nuclear plant where his father works, then hits the road and finds a spiritual path.

In the 1920s, Michael Arlen was one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in the world, but he mysteriously stopped writing altogether. His son tries to work out why this was.

An adventure story for children in eight parts, filmed on location in New Zealand. In the fourth episode, the escaped criminals travel on a ferry to Wellington in order to retrieve money from a bank robbery, with the children in pursuit.

Cult icon Klaus Kinski features in this dark and intriguing existential thriller. He plays the mysterious "Swiss Man" - ruthless industrialist Nicolas Ulrich - who is obsessed with a search for the elixir of life. He tricks a young American scientist into joining him on his demonic quest. A quest that ends in suicide, death and madness. The story takes place in the atmospheric European city of Amsterdam. Its winding alleys and ancient canals trap the characters in a labyrinthine maze as they find themselves manipulated like figures on a giant chess board.

A young restless young Amish girl falls in love with a visiting man and gets pregnant. She resorts to some drastic action and must now seek to reconcile herself with her community.

A young boy with his "Star Wars" comic book runs to the front window of a subway train and pretends to pilot a spaceship out of the station and into the black of space. He soon encounters Darth Vader.

A beautiful housewife discovers that her husband is having an affair, so while he's away on business she decides to embark on some erotic sexcapades of her own.

Derek is happily married with two young children and a steady job. Everything is rosy for him. A visit to the town where he spent his bachelor days takes him into the psst and the realisation that he still belongs to the town in a strange way.

While the rest of the world is getting ready for Christmas, all the bears in Bearbank are getting ready to sleep… except for Ted E. Bear. Ted gets curious about the holiday, and sets out to learn the meaning of it from Santa Claus himself.

William Wegman's lewd stroking of his dog apes television's crass marketing strategies.

A 1976 Filipino drama film by Danny L. Zialcita

A look at the rapidly evolving issue of sex censorship in the USA, focusing on the period just as hardcore was just about to become accepted.