Discover Movies

A montage, using documentary material filmed during the war, shows the beginnings of an air attack and Londoners entering shelters. From the silent deserted streets, the film moves underground into the world of Henry Moore's shelter drawings. People sit along subway platforms, looking after their children, settling down for the night, sleeping in bunks and on the floor. Above ground London burns. Henry Moore used the eye of a sculptor in portraying the stolidity and enduring patience of a besieged people. This film brings together a unique series of drawings which are some of the most remarkable achievements of an artist during wartime. Eliminating all narration, it explores, on several metaphoric levels, the very nature of human consciousness and creativity.

“The music is by Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Running Wild’ from Some Like It Hot, because it’s a film portrait of Nettie Thomas. She did floors in white women’s homes, like black women did to support their families in the olden days. My mother is sitting in a wicker chair with an ostrich feather boa, a grey worsted wool skirt, a silk belt. For her portrait, I used ‘All Cried Out’ by Dusty Springfield...I was advised by Gregory Markopoulos not to play the music. Because Gregory didn’t think it was proper.” - Edward Owens

Bollywood 1968

A Sidney the Elephant cartoon.

Sterling Morrison, bass guitarist of The Velvet Underground, is filmed in an extreme close-up of his left eye, which looks around in all directions. Halfway through the film, the camera zooms out to a full view of his half-lit face.

"This film describes the life of Ethiopian student and distance runner Sesibe "Subs" Mamo at Colby College in Maine. The film concentrates on Mamo's performance as a star athlete on Colby's track team and also shows him as an integrated part of college life" (US National Archives).

American Industrial Film. A Pontiac and a competitor are put to a 24-hour speed test on a racetrack to see which fares better.

With another Minnesotan campaigning for the office of Vice President, it is fascinating to look back at the issues VP candidate Hubert H. Humphrey was raising during the 1968 campaign. In newspapers at the time, the film was advertised as "The Mind Changer." It was telecast 300 times nationwide in the closing three weeks of the political race.

A musical sendup of the WWI flying ace starring poet/Warhol associate Gerard Malanga, then in town as a film festival juror

The second of multiple screen tests Kurz did at Warhol’s factory. She is photographed this time in a medium shot.

My Mirrored Hope is Sokoloff’s best-known film, now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The piece is one in a series of Schmidt-focused films made in the summer of 1963, the year Schmidt may have been at the height of his ecstatic, weather-beaten powers. It was an important time for both men. Being commissioned by the Lannan Foundation to make the Schmidt film series enabled Sokoloff to switch from an 8mm to a 16mm camera. As for Schmidt, his dream houses, originally born as fairly conventional buildings in the 1950s, had grown, through his daily attachments of newfound objects, to their most mammoth proportions. These houses were not pragmatically planned as residences, and a few short years later, they would all burn in electrical fires. Soundtrack: Alexander Scriabin's "The Poem of Fire," and the voice of Clarence Schmidt.

As the title suggests, times they are a changin'. Some fine, free jazz with the girls letting loose.

A film created from slides depicting scenes of downtown Dallas. The goal of the film was to create awareness of the immediate need to design for livability in Dallas, with a focus on transportation, development, and the Trinity River.

Lost Andy Warhol film.

This is a short film description of a room, and the way light (coming through a window) illuminates papers on a desk. An attempt to use color, camera movement and editing to transform everyday surroundings

"Along the South Shore of Nova Scotia, I poured a mixture of gasoline and oil on various stone configurations and along some beaches, lit them and filmed the results. I composed a soundtrack with a small synthesizer, tuning forks and voice, processed through a homemade distortion chamber." - David Askevold

As a senior at Yale College in 1968, Doob was invited to participate in the Scholars of the House Program, a senior honors program that required students to create, in lieu of regular classes, “a finished essay or project which must justify by its scope and quality the freedom which has been granted.” Rather than pursue a more traditional written work, Doob initially chose to make a film, an unorthodox approach that had not been previously attempted. In the end, Doob chose to make two films to fulfill the requirement, beginning with COSTUMED DANCER. The film is a progression of images of a dancer, shot and printed on high contrast stock, and stacked in the printer in a number of layers so as to create multiple images of the dancer, moving from single image to multiple image in a kind of phasing. It is cut to music composed by Doob’s friend David Sewall, who was the subject of one of Doob’s later films, LONDON SONGS (1972). (Yale Film Archive)

In the spirit of a 'mountaineering safari', four Italians fly to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and a compulsory base for both hunters of the great reserves and climbers of the great African mountains. Crossed the land of the Masai, rich in game, they, in fact, climb, in four days, up to the top of Kibo, the crater off that, with its 5895 meters, is the highest point of Kilimandjaro and all Africa. After two days of descent, they finally enter the Serengeti National Park, inside the vast crater of the Ngorongoro.

A documentary film of a large terrarium made out of wood and glass that Janiak built using handmade wood joints during the summer of 1959. The design was inspired by a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

Image analysis in slow motion. Distortion and reversed reality perspective.

A film by Victor Grauer

Van Meter had three camera rolls of 7242 Ektachrome EFB, which he fully ran through his camera each day of the 3-day Trips Festival. The end result was three 100 ft. rolls of film that each had been triple exposed in-camera, each layer of exposure representing a day of the festival. Aside from just two or three necessary structural edits, Ben spliced the three rolls together essentially unedited. This was then set to a soundtrack that was achieved in roughly the same manner, via triple layering of sound he recorded throughout the festival; He calls the film “a documentary of the Trips Festival from the point of view of a goldfish in the punch bowl.”

Since 1935, inspired by the Catholic writer/lyricist/essayist and victim of World War One, Charles Péguy, students (at first from the Sorbonne) have set off on a pilgrimage towards the cathedral in Chartres. The journey takes about two to three days, Moritz de Hadeln’s documentary of the pilgrimage, called Le Pèlé for short, lasts roughly an hour. Four crews followed the groups – there are many ways leading to Chartres – on their journey through the countryside.

An eclectic compilation of home movies and early cinematic experiments. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. “From the age of 12 onward until 17 (the restless years) the Kuchar brothers lived life to the fullest and tasted the spices of the lower class, the sugar of the bourgeoisie and the kasha of the jet set. At this time their films were seldom longer than four minutes.” –George Kuchar

"No English language issues here. The title refers to Siva/Shiva – god of the dance – who dances the world into both destruction and rebirth, and Charivari, pronounced 'Shivaree', a rude serenade to mock wedding couples -i.e. mocking the concept of passion in balance with serenity. The film’s dancing child is our daughter Jennifer, now a middle aged school teacher and a likely Bodhisattva. She dances to escape and dispel the fragmentary seductions of TV, with its chaos of sound and image. Moving toward a window and the light, she sees and ponders the wind in the trees, as the final notes of Bill Evans’ 'Peace Piece' linger and fade." –Abbott Meader

The film begins with a photo shoot, shown in a sequence of often frontal views and counterviews, in which Michelangelo Pistoletto photographs Maria Pioppi, encouraging her to assume different poses and to interact with various objects. The negatives of the photographs gradually appear over the flow of images. The images once hung on the walls, are subjected to a series of bizarre performative actions by a group of young people, as if at an opening (including the artist Ugo Nespolo and the filmmakers Renato Ferraro and Gioachino Nichot), who then shift into a dance with playful and erotic overtones. Two versions of the film exist, one developed positive and one negative. —Tate Modern

Created at Bell Labs in 1965, this short film likely contains the first computer-generated animation of human figures in motion. The figures move (or 'dance') seemingly at random on a 3D stage.

A German camera crew filmed this record of family life in Tokyo. The children go off to school and father works in the factory. It was the start of the industrial boom in the so-called Showa time. Labour was still cheap. TV sets were hand soldered. Many parts were still manufactured in small home industries. Finally the family gathers again in their tiny homes. Futons behind the wall doors. A time Japanese are still nostalgic about.

A conceptual art film composed of several, long single-take color reels of a simple wood fire. Broadcast on German television in the late-'60s, it represents perhaps the first example of the now commercialized 'TV fireplace.'

Animated film about a weird creature travelling.

009 is back with more action.

The Ghost of Monk's Island Part One Unhappy Birthday

A love story, as it happened, filmed entirely by the lovers themselves. A joyful affirmation of peace, harmony, and beauty.

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)

Drama directed by P.S. Ramakrishna Rao

Bollywood 1963

A western in Berlin: Three men on the hunt, one man on the run.

SONG 7: San Francisco (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

Short documentary belonging to the series Arte para los ojos, about an imaginary journey through Spain.

An experiment in pure design by film artists Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart. Lines, ruled directly on film, move with precision and grace against a background of changing colors, in response to music specially composed for the films.

A profile of the newly created University of Newcastle, seen through the eyes of two of its students.

Short by György Kepes.

Narrator Michael Sivy opens this richly-illustrated program with this explanatory comment: In the depths of space, there seems neither limit nor direction, neither up nor down, only movement toward or away from. No day, no seasons, everywhere movement, nowhere rest. But man has learned to track the stars and count them, and slowly he has been able to bring a sense of order to his understanding of his own planet earth. Face of the World is a perhaps unique effort to see the earth as a whole and to trace mans attempts through the ages to expand his own knowledge and use of the planets geography.

an image-less flicker film, much like Angel Eyes and Archangel.

Film that documents the big wave riding at the famed North Shore of Oahu. Viewers are introduced to surf slang and culture, as well as Hawaiian music and dancers. Surf maneuvers are shown in detail and slow motion. This is the first surf film showing Hawaiian waves and surfers.

A rare, live-action, and close-up study of the only existing Babbage Difference Engine, a machine designed in the first quarter of the 19th-Century by English inventor and mathematician, Charles Babbage. The engine, designed to calculate and print-out tables of numbers for use in navigation, insurance, and astronomy, is considered an important artifact in the history of computing. Babbage is considered to be the father of the modern computer, and the Difference Engine and Analytical Machine are forerunners of the computer. The music is ”Alamaine” and “The Scot’s March” performed by Carl Dolmetsch and the Dolmetsch Quartet.

Screen test of Henry Rago

In October, 1967, 100,000 people marched on Washington to demand an end to the Vietnam War. Marvin Fishman and Masanori Oe with help from Jonathan Chernoble documented the event and later gave the film to the newly formed Newsreel. This film depicts the peaceful march that ended in the occupation of the Pentagon grounds. Cameras were there in the midst of the fixed bayonets and billy clubs as the military turned on the demonstrators in this historic mobilization.

Split caught on film through a handheld camera play in an accelerated rhythm of Ray Charles' I've Got a Woman.

A giant space magnet connected to the top of an astronomer's observatory pulls stuff from outer space to earth. One day it also pulls leather jacket wearing space greasers from Mars.

A film by Victor Grauer

One of two(?) 1964 screen tests of Linich. Runs 4 minutes, 24 seconds in length.

Surrounds two high school students, who fall in love, get married and realize problems multiply, compared to their previous single life as carefree teenagers.

A squad of new recruits in the process of training.

Adventure serial about a school girl's search for lost jewels on a small Sicilian island.

This voyage, manned by astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders, was man's first to another celestial body, and included an orbit around the Moon on Christmas Day, 1968. Also featured on this episode are air-to-ground tapes of the astronauts' descriptions of the mission, as well as onboard photography of the Earth, Moon and intravehicular activity.

Produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1964, It Started with Muybridge begins with a voiceover proclaiming the center’s mission: “research and development for tomorrow’s weapons”. The future’s bombs, this training film claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge.

Made at the height of the Cold War, "The Communist Threat" is an over-the-top 1960's drama film about a family in East Germany trying the escape to freedom in the West.

16mm Film by Al Wong.