Cinematic Era: 1969 Vintage

Hands is a visually experimental short film that uses close-ups and expressive movements of human hands to explore themes of biology, sociology, and aesthetics. Through striking imagery, it highlights how hands serve as tools of survival, communication, labor, creation, and even danger. The film juxtaposes tender gestures with more unsettling or surreal images, creating moments of intensity that feel almost shocking. As the narrative unfolds, the sequences become less structured—shifting from bold, provocative scenes to looser, more meandering imagery. While the first half is arresting in its visual power and metaphorical depth, the momentum fades toward the end, leaving the conclusion less impactful than the earlier sequences.—A/V Geeks

The photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson were the first ever to be displayed in the Louvre, Paris. In this film the world-famous photographer turns his lens on the Québec scene, finding there the same fascination with form and movement that gives his work a mark of individuality. Here, in town and country, are young people, old people, streets and fences, homes and edifices captured in a moment of time to give a composite representation of the world of Québec.

Revolutionary Palestinian film.

Intimate and alien at the same time, this film conveys the tension of an uncertain relationship. A young woman sits on the bed in a room furnished in makeshift fashion. She shows herself in the mirror, dances and sings: ‘Coca Cola, brown power…’. – ‘In memory of those murderers who became murderers in a society in which everyone is a murderer.’ (Wolfgang Orschakowski)

Irm and Ed Sommer portray 15 artist friends, always filming the same body parts in identical order much in the way a police records department might: feet, knees, genitals, chest, face. At the end, each person signs on a board. Sublime quotes about art and artists contrast with the sight of the naked people, some of them smoking or playing with their genitals.

A group of bored young Tel Avivians in late 1960s Israel leaf through some playboy magazines whilst contemplating the conceptual meaning of “an end”.

Film by Latif Faiziyev

A documentary snapshot of the MCA Chicago exhibition, catching artists, audiences, and playful participatory works in the act of redefining what “art” can be.

Short avant-garde super 8mm film.

The introduction of computers into the workplace in 1969 posed a threat to white-collar workers whose jobs they might replace. This drama documentary looks at the situation from the perspective of the employees and of management.

This 1969 informational film was part of the U.S. Army's effort to educate troops on how best to neutralize enemy tunnels during the Vietnam War.

A group of schoolchildren are on their break.

Director Samir Auf provides through his film a depiction of Egypt based on the paintings by David Roberts, through which he reviews the history of Egypt during the nineteenth century.

This work grew out of Knud Viktor’s private family recordings of his daughter blowing soap bubbles. Due to a cancellation from the intended composer, the film features Viktor’s first sound composition.

Everyday life takes place in a square. The pedestrians move like mechanical toys. Among them are two pedestrians, who, apparently dissatisfied with this state of affairs, abandon this monotonous way of life. Like cyclists, they go towards an imagined goal where life is different. Having reached their goal, they find themselves once again in the same mechanical movement on the same square. The scene from the beginning of the film is repeated.

Although the video artwork Evolution cites the well-known image of hominid evolution, it is more interested in the evolution of the media than in the evolution of the human species. Through the feedback of a system of video devices and the search for image imitation, it creates a layered (self-)reflection of the media used. It illustrates the gradual peeling back of artistic and technical possibilities in sound, from which an image is generated by directly manipulating the surface of the filmstrip, and in images that generate sound in video feedback.

Film of a kinetic, sound-activated "Cybernetic Sculpture" developed by Wen-Ying Tsai. One part of an eight film collaboration between WGBH, Boston, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and eight visual artists which explores new ways of presenting symphonic music over television. Each artist was commissioned to create a workvisually interpreting a segment of music selected by themselves from the Orchestra's recorded repertoire. Produced at WGBH by Fred Barzyk.

Documentary about a land seizure of a camp called Fidel Castro. The protagonists are interviewed and the facts are recorded.

KRON-TV Assignment Four documentary film which aired on October 5th 1969 at 7:00pm about poverty, racism, urban renewal and community action in San Francisco's Hunters Point neighborhood (predominantly African American). Features scenes of: SFPD Community Relations Unit's Palmer Jackson walking around the neighborhood and talking with youths; Adam Rogers of Young men For Action meeting with police and community members; an interview with Dr. Arthur Coleman, head of the Hunters Point Bayview Community Health Project; Mrs Elouise Westbrook chairing a public meeting of the Joint Housing Committee; Sylvester Brown criticizing Mrs Westbrook for not permitting more voices to be heard at the meeting; Rev. Charles Lee preaching a sermon about how a "revolution" is coming, at the Ridgepoint Methodist Church; brief views of the September 1966 Hunters Point uprising (including police shooting at residents) and urban planner William Keller presenting ideas of how to transform the neighborhood.

The film was inspired by the interesting folk custom of the time of burning tires on the railway, all in order to stop the train and get on it, given that there was no real station and the train did not even stop.

Documentary short about the construction of a subway tunnel in Berlin, using immersed tubes.

The arrival of the first tourists brought unrest among the residents of the small, melancholic Dalmatian town. Some of them were tempted by the possibility of easy earnings, but besides mutual disputes, tourism also brought them encounters with people they were not accustomed to.

This film details the process of the creation of leather and the crafting of moccasins.

A Possible Possum short.

This feature film produced during the Brazilian dictatorship had a whole context of student uprisings that — when subjected to the censor board in 1969 — went through cuts that made its commercial release unfeasible.

16mm film by Marinella Pirelli.

A girl's first day of school.

Young couples shares their deviant experiances.

Thai horror film.

Mogens Zieler's attempt to convey the dynamic element in the graphics through the musical and rhythmic time course of a cartoon. (DFI)

Bob Bentley's Royal College of Art degree film, produced in 1969/70. It explores aspects of his life in a deliberately puzzling manner, influenced by French New Wave cinema.

A young couple who are having marital problems attend a $100 per day special sex school in order to salvage their marriage before it's too late.

Recovered Zulueta short.

« I made several underground films in the period between 1966 and 1969: "Two Sisters", "Drums", "Hommage è Marlene", "Dance", "Indian Summer", "Brigitte", "Gut dass es den Fußball gibt" and others. Most of them are experimental films shot on 8 mm material without sound. During the editing the films were synchronized with alienated, deformed music from magnetic tapes. The films were shown in universities, during parties or in music clubs. Some of the films were used later on as elements of scenery in the theatre piece "Zigger Zagger" by Peter Terson. They were projected contemporaneously on different screens in front, behind and on both sides of the audience in the theatre of Münster. » (Georg Brintrup)

Raw material spliced ​​into projection film, paper, leaves, vinyl, 6mm audio tape. Depending on hair, etc. the film breaks during projection. The film gets shorter with each projection, the author wrote this {Disappearance Movie} and named it.

Professor Archie Cochrane explains the research being done in Rhondda Fach on “the curse of the south Wales mining valleys”: dust disease.

Professor Balthazar goes on vacation to the South Sea where his friend Hannibal is a lighthouse keeper. Hannibal loves ice cream, difficult enough to find there. His request for transfer is denied until he can arrange a replacement: Johan the yodeler from the Alps.

A man escapes from a city to the bosom of nature. The problem is that he takes a lot of things with him. He would like to be free as a bird, but the things take control over the man and do not let him go.

A young man is victimized and beaten down by society. Peter marries young but things go sour and he attempts suicide.

Made for Art by Telephone – an exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Morris simply dictated instructions for the making of the film. Despite this conceptual origin, it is also an essentially cinematic ‘performance’, exploiting slow motion, tight framing and an implicit analogy between the transparent glass door against which the figure pushes, and the screen or image surface. The repetitions and variations, the use of gesture, weight and force, give the performance a dance-like gravity.

THE DC FIVE MEMORIAL FILM is structured in five sections: a young man writhing in ecstasy in a deserted house in Massachusetts; rephotographed home movies of my childhood in 1953 Connecticut; footage shot at my farm in upstate New York in the summer of 1969, as some friends of mine share cigarettes in the woods; a party at the Sanctuary Discotheque in the summer of 1969, photographed using the same reel of color film reloaded into the camera at least seven or eight times; and finally the apotheosis of the work, in which a group of young women, arms linked, walk through the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the dead of night.

Gyöngyike is misinformed by her mother on issues like gender roles, sexuality and morals in relationships, as she takes good care of her daughter, and wants to cast off troubles when leaving this world behind.

Film installation by Marinella Pirelli.

experimental short film by Moucle Blackout

"I shot this film, Italian Capriccio, as if it were my last. Now I see I had nothing to offer to anybody. No thought, no suggestion, nounderstanding. It is my conviction that this is a way to make this film uninteresting. I hope that Power will get people riled enough some day."

In 1917 a village which lies directly on the front line at Marasesti is evacuated. One of the few who decide to stay is an old man together with his 12 year old granddaughter named Mariuca. The girl befriends a Romanian radio operator who had set up an artillery observation post in their yard.

Second part of the series Mangini dedicated to boxing as a possibility for the social rescue of young Italians. In the south, shepherds train by running after sheep and gyms are improvised. In Rome, young Roma people struggle against discrimination in the ring. In the north, a father trains his son so that he can achieve the victories the father missed.

A boy runs away from home when his father dies. In Villa Gesell things happen to him that will end in a new escape.

[…A] tribute to the Sun. It is a celebration of light and water shot in Ohio and while crossing the country to the Northwest during the spring and summer of 1969.

"Do something for the camera!" In the late twenties, 16mm home movie cameras became available and the well-off used them through the 1930s. Then the 8mm camera increased participation in the very events it recorded, drawing out the facts of who we are or play at being. In this film, Americans – across stages of life, across decades, in backyards, at a graduation picnic, on a beach and in other ordinary places – reveal silly, happy, intense and sad things about themselves, mostly with exuberance and dignity. The film is arranged without internal editing of the found sequences.

This film is a limited portrait of Stan Brakhage. The subject attempts to describe the experience that he is involved in by means of immediately responding to the aural and visual stimuli which surround and affect him. Brakhage involves the viewer in the subjective experience of the space in which he is seated, the camera, lights and technicians which created the experiential process. He further extends the parameters of the film's scope through the interjection of real or possibly apparent silence. -S.G., from The Film-makers' Coop