Discover Movies

"The original was standard 8mm material that I'd shot in a village in Italy. The material had gone through a process of deterioration. I'd used it in performing and taken it through an old Russian slide projector. I took the lens out of this projector so I could pull the film strip through it, and that meant the image could be focused on different surfaces. Instead of the image falling onto a screen, I could direct it around the room with the lens in my hand. In the process it got very torn and scratched, and it was that material I eventually put in the contact printer and made into the 16mm film Frames." – Annabel Nicolson

A 1976 color documentary by Felix Greene examining changes in Tibet between 1950 and 1976, made after a period in which few Westerners were reported to have entered the region.

"A simple, entirely unaffected portrait of a family which happens to be black" is how Sid's Family was described by a Monthly Film Bulletin reviewer at the time of its release. The film is the first in a trilogy charting the lives of Jamaican-born, Bristol-based Sid Williams and his family at eight year intervals from 1972 through 1980 to 1988.

Documentary on the 1970s teenybopper and weenybopper phenomenon, mostly focusing on twelve-year-old North Londoner Darren Burn and EMI's attempts to launch his career, which ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Eyes and ears. It's your lookout. An exercise in how to cross the road when there are no marked road crossings.

A film on transvestism (cross dressing) and transexualism (sex change), consisting mainly of interviews with transvestites, transsexuals and their families, in which they discuss the problems they and others face in coming to terms with this experience. One transsexual relates her treatment at the hands of neighbours and police, whilst another examines these sexual variations in the context of gay and women's liberation.

John Pilger returns to Vietnam in 1974. America had withdrawn its ground forces at the beginning of the previous year, he reports, yet the war had not ended. During this ‘peace’, more than 70,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed.

Are you dangerously addicted to boring old movies? The BFI was nearing its fortieth year of curing such an affliction when this animated promotional film was made to sell its virtues.

Showing a boy running on the sand, and abruptly ending before he steps on a broken glass bottle, the film urges people to use a bin or take their litter home ...

Sir John Betjeman visits and explains the architecture of various churches in the Diocese of Norwich. Among those visited: Sandringham church on the Queen's private estate, the Holy House of Our Lady of Walsingham and Norwich Cathedral.

The Great LEGO Train Crash Disaster is a 1975 brickfilm about a collision between a train and a car. It was shared online in 2007 by YouTube user "f1lby", and was filmed by his father, with story input from himself at age 8. It is the earliest known brickfilm filmed in the UK, as well as one of the very earliest known brickfilms in general. It prominently features the 1972 LEGO set 171 Train Set without Motor.

The world seen as a vast carnival, in which the clowns imitate the greed and avarice of human beings. Experimental animation film, using cut-out figures to reflect and symbolise human traits.

On the buses in Southampton, as this traffic scheme tried to end commuter misery by prioritising public transport

A film made for the staff of the (then) British Rail featuring mainly Sir Peter Parker explaining to staff how, as the new Chairman, he intended to take the industry forward.

Artist John Smith tells stories about tower block life, editing in bold, unconventional fashion, cutting into the material and highlighting the components and conventions of the film form - yet an intimate portrait of the block's inhabitants still emerges.

Time and motion study. Renny Croft turning a cartwheel, from fast to slow motion, also stopped and shuffled.

Silver Street was shot in a single day from my student house in Reading, Berkshire, where I studied Fine Art. Shots were made indoors and outdoors every hour. I adopted a shooting system using consistent framings, interspersed with variations. The film contrasts the interior personal space with the noisy street outside. - Nicky Hamlyn

Commercial and technical developments on British Rail: new freight loads, air conditioned carriages, an ultrasonic test-train for checking the permanent way, a lecture train, and a new station for motorists - all part of the railway scene in the 1970's.

Aspects of the precision and drama of locomotive manufacture, composed to form a lively pattern in picture and sound.

About three years in the making, it was put together out of hundreds of fragments culled from a pretty formidable archive of of found, borrowed, snitched and home-made material. All this going on late at night to the sounds of John Peel's famous record programme featuring the most adventurous music prior to Punk - some of which inevitably found its way onto the sound-track.

With a rock music soundtrack, Choke suggests pop art in its treatment of Piccadilly Circus at night. Multipally exposed and treated images mirror each other or travel across the two screens. Originally made as a 2 screen film in 1971 from standard 8mm film blown up to 16mm. Recently digitized, and both screens combined in wide screen video format.

Short film of an eclipse.

Local community activists interview tenants of Murchison Road, London, W10, about the negative impact of local building works on their lives. It was presented to the Local Council.

A re-worked version of Your Lips 1 with multiple colour superimpositions. Originally shown with a soundtrack from computer artist Alan Sutcliffe but replaced by a re-mixed track of one of the prepared piano pieces made by Le Grice in 1964/5.

A surfer, filmed and shown on tv, refilmed on 8mm,and refilmed again on 16mm.Simple loop structure preceded by four minutes of a still frame of the surfer. An image on the borders of apprehension, becoming more and more abstract. The surfer surfs, never surfs anywhere, an image suspended in the light of the projector lamp. A very quiet and undramatic film, not particularly didactic. Sound: the first four minutes consists of a fog-horn, used as the basic tone for a chord played on the organ, the rest of the film uses the sound of breakers with a two second pulse and occasional bursts of musical-like sounds.

art of BFI's "National Coal Board Collection".

The viewer needs to make up their own mind about what they are looking at -- Bataillesque porn or a woman in a summer dress negotiating a barbed wire fence.

One of a series of films that uses soundtracks generated directly from their own imagery. I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonics. – G.S.

British Public Information Film about the importance of removing the door when throwing a refrigerator away.

The constructional techniques of the 1974 building attempt. Also examines the history and background of the tunnel project, and outlines the engineering problems faced.

An animated cartoon of the Greek legend, which interprets the mood and style of Robert Garioch's poem.

Children growing up in poverty is the subject of Smashing Kids, 1975. John Pilger meets the Hopwoods, of Liverpool, where hunger has become a way of life during father Harry’s unemployment as his family of five survive on £1 a day. The wallpaper in their council house is torn and there are no clothes in the couple’s wardrobe and no sheets on their bed. The family have never had a holiday and Harry tells Pilger: “It would be easier to serve time than to put up with this.”

An educational film intended for children from 6 to 8 years of age. ‘We Grew A Frog, 1970’ tells the story of two schoolchildren, Lynne and Martin, who collect frog spawn from the village pond, take it to school, and there, in a tank, watch the spawn grow into frogs. The film shows in close-up the developmental stages of the spawn-to-frog process. This educational film features the pupils of Whatfield School in Suffolk. Headteacher, Gwen Dunn wrote and told the story.

Created by the King George after-school Cine Club and Sheila Graber.

Are you a dog or a cat person? If you favour the felines then this animated meditation on cats of all shapes and sizes is for you. The film grew out of industry veteran Vera Linnecar's play with applying mottled coloured paints directly onto animation cels. Paired with the piano music these scenes are a playful experiment, mixing abstraction with careful observation of cat behaviour. Vera started her animation career at the Halas & Batchelor studio in 1940, as did Elizabeth Horn, who also worked on this film. Moving from tracing, to inbetweening, to animating, Vera became one the company's principle artists. In the late 1940s she moved to the Larkins studio which better suited her experimental spirit. In 1957, along with Nancy Hanna, she joined Bob Godfrey and Keith Learner at Biographic, and continued innovating there until she retired in 1983, after four decades in the business.

A BAFTA award nominated documentary tracing the development of the gear from the first recorded use in a crude form over two thousand years ago to its widespread use in many forms today.

The Film Unit at Sheffield University Union of Students produced many fascinating films during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This one, with its surreal landscapes and alarmingly prescient storyline, is definitely on the imaginative outer limits of their collection. It has five men on the run from a controlling state organisation that is capturing the population on 3D film images, thereby making everyone dispensable.

A found-footage film made entirely from Academy leader, which is normally used to cue the start of films. The film was hand-printed on a home-made contact printer. It was rolled back and re-printed several times over, to create a complex layering of both image and sound.

Ignorant of democracy but hungry for the West they cannot visit, the 17 million East Germans are a force that could decide the fate of Russia's European Empire. For most of the past decade they have been isolated by the Berlin Wall and a fortified border over 600 miles (965 km) long. Cold War attitudes have been slowest to melt in East Germany but this summer for the first time the German Democratic Republic opened its borders for three weeks to let in a BBC film crew. This is the first full-length report by a British television team on the life of the Germans who live 'Beyond the Wall.'

Short by Vera Neubauer.

A documentary feature following Rupert Keegan, a Formula 1 racing driver, as he struggles to qualify for the British Grand Prix in the season's least competitive car.

An interim view of the North West New town from David Mahlowe

Documentary from 1975 on the plight of mentally handicapped children held in appalling circumstances in the UK.

A rude and angry parable of woman's disenchantment with men who only want to finger her flower.

The Kings Road punks go on a day trip - to 10 Downing Street! - in this edition of Captain Zip's Video Trip

Part of BFI collection "They Stand Ready." This sort film look at life aboard HMS Sheffield.

A BBC short feature. J.G. Ballard reflects on cars and our interactions with them.

A businessman who studies witchcraft as a hobby and a businesswoman who heads a coven are interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Shows the initiation of new members into a coven and the attempt by a "circle" to heal a member.

First polygonal rotating object computer animation

Short by Vera Neubauer.

A BAFTA award winning documentary depicting the opening of the North Sea Forties oil field by HM Queen Elizabeth II.

Noodle Spinner takes some basic documentary footage of a Chinese noodle spinner and then loops, split, reduces and staggers it to present a series of multiple-image collages in motion: in an inventive way the film's form thus resembles the process it was seeking to represent.

'Slides' came about through some fascination with the phenomena of matter, its frailty and transcience, the oddness of tiny filmed images from my earlier work lying around. Working with these parts, 35 mm slides cut into strips, thread, sewn film, light leaked footage, 8mm and 16mm fragments, I hand held this material in the contact printer. Images were created by movement and handling, literally keeping in touch with the elements.'

A 1973 Public Information Film on the dangers of fooling around with fireworks in the run up to November 5th

"Impatience and tragedy are frequent travelling companions", as illustrated by this safety film made by the National Coal Board's prolific film unit. Miner Bert's enthusiasm to leave the pit at the end of his shift to hasten to his bookie and claim his winnings ends in catastrophe. And there are further cautionary tales...

A basic composition of brick wall and man seated facing the camera, laughing his head off. No temporal or narrative framing is ever given , it is just the person, the action, and the manipulation of the sound and image that describe the conditions of being in front of and behind the camera.