Cinematic Era: 1971 Vintage

A short work by Si Fried, screened by the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1972

The executioner binds a prisoner at the stake. He lights a match and the prisoner spits on it and puts it out. But the fire is lit with the second match. The prisoner puts his hands together and prays for the rain. Rain begins to fall. Falling, falling, falling, and water drowned the convict — good luck, bad luck — they all come quickly.

Sharon Green's short film Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer (1971) represents a collision of incipient cinefeminism and autobiographical filmmaking. Containing a blend of still photographs and subjective moving-image shots of her body, the work has largely been overlooked because of a reductive framing of it as mere homage to male avant-garde artists such as Stan Brakhage, for whom Green was a nude model.

“The destruction of trees in Sydney...chainsaws, the trees really screaming out. Rapid zooming, often close up shooting. In Edgecliff and Paddington, near where I lived, I'd travel around with the council workers as they lopped established trees, made way for progress...power lines, new buildings. On the Cahill Expressway, across from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, huge old Moreton Bay Figs were being butchered. As they were ripping and cutting into the trees, I was ripping into them…very physically, rapid zooming. I wanted a very strong message. It was way over the top, really…screeching chainsaws and woodchip machines. There was no real Green Movement in those days. When I showed the film, people came up to me and said I’d made them feel guilty for lopping down trees in their own yard. The aggression of the film still causes people trouble.” (Paul Winkler)

An animation film based on a Latvian folk tale.

"Used as creative writing stimulus, elementary and high school. Has been likened to a journey into inner/outer space." -RS

A Super8 of desecrating and captivating animation, made by one of the greatest representatives of the Italian "art film".

The portrait of a group of prostitutes trying to cope with their work and life

A short amateur film by director T. Ivančić.

A short film about ants and their everyday activities. The audio of the film is currently lost.

Film poem in negative by Pier Farri. The second part of his trilogy 'Night scenes of artists and poets'.

Traditional music of the Trobriand Islands is played on a variety of flutes, from simple curving stems to panpipes. Songs (wosi) are also an important part of Trobriand music, and although everyone may compose and sing, people with special talents are encouraged to develop their skills. A range of songs are filmed and translated here: gardening and sailing songs, kula trading songs, songs of love and enticement, of grief and mourning. The film also reveals glimpses of everyday and ritual life: villages, gardens (and their magic), exchange, harvest dances, children in the rain.

A film animation experiment in metaphoric imagery. This is a surrealistic garden where the earth seethes with strange, unusual shapes and activity, accelerated in movement, compressed in time. Insect-like creatures dart under and over the sand with elusive swiftness; Picasso-like faces stare momentarily upward, mutate, and disappear; wilted blossoms become suddenly animated. What happens on the screen is punctuated and accompanied by synthetic sound effects.

The story of a Sausalito houseboat owner, his brother and various hippie girlfriends.

A lonely street musician meets a young soldier who has just deserted.

Portrays a combination of mounts, dismounts, floor skills and a variety of stunts ranging from beginning, medium to superior difficulty. Demonstrates spotting techniques. Includes combined movements for useful beam routines.

The Ways of Water was made with the Earth Science Curriculum Project and the Environmental Studies Project of the American Geological Institute. A study of the water cycle on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, the narratorless, poetic film is enriched by Blank’s characteristically graceful and fluid camera movements. Its musical soundtrack was created using an analog synthesizer." - Dan Streible, notes from The 57th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

Educational film on the effects of prescription drugs and drinking when driving.

It is a fictional film directed by the amateur director in Super 8 Dr. Jorge N. Mario in 1971. It is a western that takes place in a hypothetical region of Mexico, and narrates the adventures of a man seeking revenge.

Unfinished documentary portrait. During 1971, Henri Langlois was spending his life at the Cinémathèque at the Palais de Chaillot and devoting himself entirely to the development of his museum without ever sparing himself. He needs to touch, place, nail, shape each corner himself, imagining each new arrangement. The smallest detail counts, the smallest fold of costume. He can spend hours adjusting a jacket, and fatigue sometimes surprises him around a staircase ...

...strikingly uses sequences of an actual birth, microphotography of sperm and egg cells, a fetus, and sex acts that are more dance form than sexy, as an effective, if oblique approach, to one man's reaction to the terrifying enigma of life and living."

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. Inspired by the work's completion — the students covered the walls with the phrase — Baldessari committed his own version of the piece to videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, "I will not make any more boring art" over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari's methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson — to refrain from creating "boring" art.

Follows the experiences of two brothers and their little sister as they explore the inside of a large empty house which is rumored to be haunted.

A short film by John Baldessari

A documentary about the girls at Marabou and their work situation.

David Cort of the Videofreex travels to Jerusalem. This tape contains raw footage of him as he is taken on a tour through a poor neighborhood by a group of young men. There is talk of the Israeli Black Panther Party, and of drug dealers and poverty. Somebody says the tape is being made for the Jewish Museum in NYC. The Israeli guide talks about the movement, and says the bourgeois and the poor can meet through parties and drugs. They visit a woman and her children who are living in poverty, and interview her about the needs of her family. She says, “You coming to take pictures won’t help us.” During the next scene in a room full of people in suits, the conversation is about the Black Panther Party and the plight of the poor.

"Abstraction deals with the interpretation of abstract form as found in the combination of the nude body, landscape, and objects. Imagery is achieved through visual distortion dealing with reflective surfaces, as well as the superimposition of subject matter. The rhythmic structure focuses on a pulsating expansion and contraction that simulates a life force. An attempt has been made to reveal the basic concepts of a painter's approach to the distillation of reality." —Rosalind Schneider

Documentary about futurist painter Gerardo Dottori.

The first part of Aspects of a Hill by Naomi Levine

The objective is to show myself visiting myself, and then showing the frustration of loneliness, by trying to be with myself. –Al Wong

A “Cinéastes de notre temps” series episode directed by french film critic Jean-Louis Comolli, originally aired 5 March 1971.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ - each letter is one frame (1/24 of a second) long and each letter originates from a company sign. The film shows the paradoxical relationship between film and written language. (E.S.jr.)

Sequences of war footage and artwork set to comical background music. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

A story about love...

A young black couple go for a walk in the country. They undress and begin foreplay with much kissing and caressing.This couple has a varied sexual pattern, including mutual oral-genital activity with her on top, intercourse in several positions, and both direct and circular thrusting. There is a great deal of affection and continual touching. At one point, she guides his penis back into her vagina. A warm-feeling film."

A woman wakes up, gets dressed, makes breakfast and walks down the street. This daily ritual becomes extraordinary seen in a trance-like structure of continuous lap dissolves and continuous spectral color shifts.

A musical short which purports to be about teaching children to read, using stock footage of turkeys.

The poetic work of Ewa Partum consisted in scattering single alphabet letters into a non-artistic space: be it the open air, sea, or an underpass. This gesture led to the deconstruction of a language whereupon grammatical, syntactic and semantic structures were used to determine certain patterns of an artistic statement. Her poems were shaped by coincidence, which made their language more open and process-orientated. The confrontation with the elements associated with femininity (water, wind) made it possible to face the patriarchal patterns rooted in the language.

A short film by Maria Lassnig.

A chinese documentary.

Summer of '70 on the Adriatic: fun at the beach, a beauty contest, water skiing, holiday hedonism. A postcard of endless indifference when growing up in Yugoslavia.

Film by Wolfgang Urchs.

A videographic film exploiting the phosphor textures on the cathode screen. Video images are filmed, filter-coloured and supered in the camera.

Film by Ray L. Birdwhistell produced by the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute

A collage of autobiography, reflections on previous work and the photographer in action. Van der Elsken tells us that he’s working on a photo book about life, from the cradle to the grave, about how people are: physical, sensuous, naked. He takes the time to show us a selection from the thousands of slides he has made during his wide-ranging travels as a photo reporter.

Mohamed Aboulouakar’s diploma film from VGIK in Moscow, based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Footage of American bombing of Vietnam.

Bourne documenting the options granted to high school students who want to attend college

Structuralist film collage consisting of 8mm film "notes" printed directly on 16mm stock. The images include people and landscapes and the technical difference between the two film formats are emphasised by the presence of perforations, Kodak company marking, spacing, and leader.

A short documentary about the spanish town of Tomelloso and the hat the villagers use to wear

Filmed with hand-painted cut-out paper characters and background sets. Rated X for violence, nudity and sexual activities by paper people. "The film takes you into the repressed areas of the psyche, the dark regions of the soul. It is a trip deep into the self, beyond the limits of conventional morality where good and evil merge into one. There are no governing laws at this level of the mind and that is the terror and its fascination." -David Bienstock, Curator of Film, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972

A court's decision to take away a mother's child after a divorce and grant the father sole custody leads to a clash of human law and written law.

Part 2 of the History of Australian Cinema series. Covering the 1920s and 30s. From an origin that promised so much, the Australian film production industry faced new challenges from abroad which ultimately proved to be more than they could cope with. Unfortunately very few films from then now survive.

A dramatic encounter on St Kilda Pier between two derelicts and a would-be suicide.

When a scientist finds a cocoon a woman emerges from it. She is being chased by two faceless monsters who are collecting specimens for a museum.

“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” – Stan Brakhage