Cinematic Era: 1972 Vintage

A look at Scotland's first country park.

Courtesy of The Freedom Archives 1972, 28 min. This extraordinary video is from a 16mm film “work print” made in 1971–1972, and includes interviews with George Jackson, Georgia Jackson (George and Jonathan Jackson’s mother) and Angela Davis, while she was still in the Marin County Courthouse Jail, before her acquittal. We have not been able to identify the other prisoners. As you will see, the film has no titles or other credits. The discovery of such amazing, previously unknown historic materials always leaves us thrilled and in awe, deepening our understanding of those times and affirming the mission of the Freedom Archives.

Examines some of the present-day practices of Satan worship and the cults of black magic.

A psycho starts killing women (including a striptease dancer) and raping their corpses. When that doesn't work out for him, he digs up graves and has his way with the bodies. Police attempt to trap the corpse rapist by baiting him with a beautiful policewoman.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate a vampire attack in the streets of London.

In 1972, James Lee Byers was invited by Harald Szeemann to participate in "documenta 5" in Kassel, where the performance "Calling German Names" marked a turning point in his career. Dressed in red silk, Byars called out a succession of common German names through a megaphone from the top of the Fridericianum. The performance was repeated that same year from the top of the clock tower in Berne.

Two disembodied male colleagues direct Lynda Benglis, who sits between a monitor and a camera lens loudly exclaiming her vision for the video we’re watching. Playing with the idea of originality and how the reproduction of images troubles fine art categories, Benglis affixes a double portrait of herself to the monitor screen and draws moustaches on both likenesses. Document ends with Benglis writing the video’s title and “copyright, Dec. 1972” directly on the monitor underneath the photograph, validating this video accomplishment as an original artwork.

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.

...Boyer's L'amertube explores the way in which video feedback can create medium-specific distortions in visual perception. -Scott MacKenzie

Nikkatsu Roman Porno

The first animated short about Tom Thumb by Viktor Kubal

Salomien is sent to prison for murdering her husband, Ernst. She is suffering from amnesia, but the prison's chaplain believes she will be able to remember by writing down her fragmented memories. This the story of her husband's murder unfolds

Does a boy with an unsettled home life stand a chance?

Pink film by Kan Mukai.

A seemingly insignificant event occurs in the lives of a young couple, and then something happens to them, something significant in that they are driven into a new pattern of life, one that they are strangers to.

"Antti Peippo's first documentary as a director is a different kind of tourism film of Suomenlinna fortress - a dark and gloomy portrait of a monument to totalitarianism and oppression." - Short Films by Antti Peippo DvD

A stop-motion adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Nightingale.

I had long wanted to make a film on Hans Richter who has been an important figure in my life, and this is the result. Almost unedited, it was shot one summer Sunday afternoon in 1968 at a picnic with friends and relatives. Jonas Mekas was also shooting the event, and his version is included in his recent films "Diaries," "Notes" and "Sketches."

A woman experiencing motorcycle chases, roller-coaster rides and gets into various sexual encounters. A Three dimensional short.

In one of his first experiments in video, Emshwiller creates an electronic landscape of both abstract and figurative elements, where colorized dancers are chroma-keyed into a mutable, computer-animated environment. Working with the "Scan-i-mate," an early analog video synthesizer, Emshwiller choreographs an architectural, illusory video space, in which frames proliferate within frames, disembodied heads and hands move within a collage of animated forms, and the dancers and their environment are subjected to constant transformations through image processing. With its witty interplay of the "real" and the "unreal" in an electronically rendered videospace, and the skillful manipulation and articulation of a sculptural illusion of three-dimensionality, Scape-mates introduced a new vocabulary of video image-making.

A young man pushed beyond his endurance remembers his life on the roof of a tall building. He's there to commit suicide.

A documentation of the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami by a group of mediamakers working under the auspices of the Women's Video News Service

Early experimental film from Zbigniew Rybczynski that broke new ground in the use of pixelation, optical printing, animation and other compositional film devices. Beautiful jazz score and color usage.

A representation of fiction and documentary about the museum of Óbidos, Portugal.

In this film that fuses music and film perfectly, witness these people explore the world of love and the beauty of madness that comes with it

A vivid sampler of the great Barcelona architect-sculptor’s work in situ, Sokoloff constantly is seeking out the most anthropomorphic images embedded in the intricacies of Gaudi’s buildings.

Titled Power, Tretti's sophomore film was a sort of Mel Brooks' History of the World, in which Tretti explored the history of mankind from one precise point of view: how the powerful ruled over the weak. A man confused as the God of Fire in prehistory; Jesus and Muhammad deciding who must eat what and when because of a power no one has seen; Tiberius Gracchus killed by the senate because he was fighting for the people. Tretti had a bullet for everyone. He loved to unmask those who claimed to be on the side of the less fortunate, showing the three powers - military, commercial and agricultural - sitting on three thrones and chatting on how they can suck life out of men and keep power tight in their hands.

Made under the Burmese dictatorship, Maung Wanna’s debut feature tells a story of Sein Lin, the drummer for a traditional dance theatre group in Rangoon, who falls in love with beautiful dancer Khin San. When she leaves the group to pursue a career as a film actress, he gives her a small figure as a keepsake, a symbol of traditional theatre. He tells her to return it only when she is certain she wants to stay in film. The dancer’s independence in choosing to become a film actress breaks with cultural tradition, as does Sein Lin’s performance in a jazz club, symbolising the colonial influence.

Finis Hominis sets out to right wrongs, expose corruption and end the social unrest that he sees in the world.

István and Jakab are fire-extinguisher experts. They travel the country to check fire-extinguishers at country factories. During their tours of inspection they chase women, drink in dirty pubs and live in clover.

Leonid Komkov, despite his lack of experience, is obsessed with becoming a helmsman on a riverboat.

Musical fantasy on the themes of Russian folk nursery rhymes and songs.

Prenatal care and the advice for pregnant woman to enable a safe and healthy birth.

A father tries to make his little daughter understand the reason for his political imprisonment. The jungle serves as an allegory of society and the hunter as its danger.

Interview-based documentary about the conditions for gays and lesbians in Danish society.

A musical about an unhappy couple and the man that stands between them. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

Pinku from 1972.

Unemployment in Sweden

The various work posts within the complex Physics and Engineering laboratory, and some of their work results across the five continents, in tunnels, bridges, dams and hydroelectric plants.

About the election campaign of the first female member of the US Congress.

During his childhood, Nino arrived from Italy to live with his uncle in a humble neighborhood. There, he begins working in a butcher shop and falls in love with Natalia, his neighbor. However, she has other aspirations, such as winning over her boss at the jewelry store where she works.

Young Iskander is the first to learn that his father has been killed at the front, but he hides the news to protect his mother. He finds strength in his friendship with Rano and Igor, who has also lost his father in the war.