Cinematic Era: 1973 Vintage

Home movie by Ken Jacobs. Black and white and silent.

A delightfully and cleverly animated film similar in style to Kathy Rose's other films

Kubota narrates this surrealistic video diary of her month-long sojourn with a Navajo family on a reservation in Chinle, Arizona. Captures footage of tribal songs and dances, children's pranks and a local rodeo.

In an esoteric temple, grown men return to their boyhood and play innocently. Model aeroplanes, paper butterflies, vehicles, tin toys... the things that boys like emerge from the darkness. A short film that visualises dreams of a distant boyhood with a unique aesthetic.

A collection of performance works enacted for the camera. The performances focus on interventions on the human body, using feathers, hair and garment-like sculptures worn by a performer, and are set against a neutral background or an otherwise deserted outdoor location.

For the past eighty years, believers living in the Appalachian hills of the southeastern US have incorporated handling serpents and drinking strychnine (a “salvation cocktail”) into their religious beliefs and practice. While serpent handling has been outlawed in all but two southern states, there remain several thousand practicing snake handlers today, most of whom live in poor coal mining communities. In accordance with their faith, handlers refuse medical treatment when bitten. Nevertheless, there have been fewer than 100 confirmed deaths in the history of snake handling. In They Shall Take Up Serpents, we hear the voices of believers and nonbelievers alike, widows who have lost their husbands to snakebites and wives who fear the same fate. The documentary is an intimate portrait of unwavering faith and religious ecstasy virtually unknown in mainstream American traditions.

Renowned Brazilian samba singer-songwriter Nelson Cavaquinho performing at TV Cultura in 1973.

The story about a group of people struggling to expand agricultural land in North Vietnam.

A TV movie adapted from a Pirandello play.

The picture retraces the professional, social and family life of Zeca, a cow-boy from the northeast of Brazil. From the most perfect calm he can fly into a state of the wildest excitement. From his lazy hammock he leaps into the hard saddle, which carries him at breakneck speed along tortuous paths in search of his cattle.

Experimental filmmaker JoAnn Elam guides (or limits) the viewer's eyes down a rural, wooded path.

Images of a shadow puppet play, intermittent rapid editing, and sweeping shots of a farm, dogs playing outside, plants, kitchens and interiors, provide a naturalistic portrait of peaceful spaces and friends. Date of production unknown.

This film is the quadruple superimposition of four faces, two men and two women. These images often appear to be one fantastic undulating face perpetually changing. The images are shot thru a circular mat in an attempt to get away from the dominant rectangular film image (much as earlier filmmakers have done). I have recently added a sound track, on separate cassette tape. It is the Talking Head’s ‘Seen and Not Seen.’ The film can be viewed with or without the track—or first with, then without. (Robert Huot)

An image of an Inari shrive, overlapped with the hands of a monk holding a symbol. The work’s shamanistic imagery and rapid speed are precursors to the more spiritual and psychedelic animation of Aihara’s later years.

When the objectified woman strikes back... Michka receives and secretly films men who approached her on the street. How do men of different ages and backgrounds react to their dream: being welcomed by a woman they like, who is wealthy and willing?

A young boy is excited about starting school, next year, based on the stories told by his older friends.

Directed by John Smith

Politically animated short film in response to Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973.

The history of the people of Haiti, from the landing of Columbus on the "Pearl of the Pacific" to the recent period and the difficult struggles for freedom and democracy. This film traces the struggle of the Haitian people for their freedom from the arrival of Christopher Columbus to Jean-Claude Duvalier. Historical figures such as Rodolphe Moïse, Ulrick Jolly, Justin Castera, all of whom have since passed away, call for unity for the reconstruction of the country. An indispensable film to read a page of Haitian history.

Du Cane describes his cinema as “as close as I can get to an immediate transference onto celluloid of my flux-like process in response to being here now, filming.” Sign is a “room film”, shot entirely in what appears to be the filmmaker’s studio: film cans, reels and other cinematographic can sometimes be distinguished amongst the rapid camera movements. Du Cane’s rarely shown films are amongst the most pure and radical of their period. Instinctive yet formal, structured and organic, the physical world is turned into a screen-based labyrinth that is both surface and depth, through the retinal rush of incremental superimpositions and delicate cameral control.

Shot on Super 8mm in color and silent.

1973 video by Bernard Parmegiani with accompanying musique concrete score.

This feature documentary is a factual account of the life of policemen at one station in Montreal, drawn from 60 days and nights of on-the-spot filming in the early 1970s. It is a view of life in the inner city that usually only the policeman has reason to encounter. There are ugly incidents here, but there is also reassurance that people in trouble do have help at hand.

This complex and enigmatic work, which is performed by Jonas and Lois Lane, explores female gestures, poses, the body and narcissism. Mirroring each other with synchronized movements as they perform as alter-egos, Jonas and Lane reference archetypal female gestures and poses from popular and traditional cultures. Throughout the performance, space is dislocated and altered as a formal device — segmented by a swinging bar, superimposed in layers, transformed by subtle changes in light and shadow, or flattened by the video screen. With its evocative personal theater and idiosyncratic vocabulary of gestures, ritual and symbolism, Glass Puzzle is a quintessential Jonas work.

From LUX: "Welsby adopts a system of camera movements to chart the movement of tides, waves and sky".

Following an introduction which establishes the social context of the film, ‘The Politics of Perception’ presents a one-minute promotional film advertising a popular Hollywood thriller. This section then repeats itself: a print is generated from the one-minute segment, then a print from the print, and so on as the image and sound slowly disintegrate with each new cycle, until the visual and sound information have completely evolved to white light and white noise. The most original film from the Northwest area. ‘The Politics of Perception’ explores conceptually the paradoxes of communication and the very nature of film itself, progressing from movie reality to its utter abstraction. A maddeningly stimulating work!

Scripted documentary about the life and career of painter, experimental film-maker, surrealist Hans Richter. Interview of Richter, examples of his art work, excerpts from his films.

with Jimi Lyons

Considered to be the first of Ana Mendieta's video, performance and film based pieces responding to the death and murder of Sara Ann Otten on March 13 of 1973.

In the first day of liberation, partisan Meke enters the palace where the king used to live.

1973 Czech experimental short by Petr Skala

1973 Czech experimental short by Petr Skala.

In an ordinary city apartment there lived a stocking. One day she was sitting at home while fluffy white snow was falling outside the window. Suddenly, she felt very bored and sad because of the routine she felt she was stuck in.

About the bear cub's first acquaintance with the outside world.

At first, the brothers lived on the same hand together and harmoniously. But one day they found a box of jewelry, and the friendship instantly cracked. Everyone believed that it was he who deserved the most expensive jewelry.

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films' narratives.

A young dancer re-choreographed through film editing. This film was originally made in standard 8mm from a home movie.

In Nyae Nyae, water often remains in open pans. Sometimes if the rains have been heavy, water stays in these pans, like small lakes, all year. In this film five Ju/'hoan men visit Nama pan. /Ti!kay washes the clothes he acquired on his trip to rescue his band's wives from a farm (as shown in An Argument About a Marriage). The other men bathe. The men use the opportunity to exchange sexual jokes with pleasure and hilarity. This film provides an interesting comparison with A Group of Women.

Prosecutor Song Kuk Jin expanded his private funds to run an accommodating Institute Hee Mang Ja Yul Won for children who committed crimes before. One day, a woman police officer Kim Seong Suk is dispatched there for one-person-one-skill education.

Music: Carl Stone. Colored pen-and-ink drawings, like topological maps of biomorphic objects, grow and evolve from the red star. Once the master image is formed, this continuously throbbing, pulsating sight is used to ring changes based on years of optical work. Music and picture work together to create a mood of ecstatic tranquility. The bright colors, beautiful music, surprise at the end, etc. make this a good film for young children. Awards: Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1973; Washington National Student Film Festival, 1974; Brooklyn Independent Filmmakers Exposition, 1974; Vanguard Int'l Competition of Electronic Music for Film, 1974; Humboldt Film Festival, 1974. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'.

Windmill II is one of a series of films (Wind Vane, Anemometer, Tree, Park, Estuary etc.) which uses an element present within the frame as a feedback device to control an aspect of the recording process. In this case it is the wind moving the leaves on the trees within the frame which also causes the windmill to rotate like a secondary shutter in front of the camera. This rotation of the mirrored windmill blades causes the image on the screen to alternate between the space in front of the camera, seen intermittently through the blades, and the space behind the camera, reflected in the blades. When the windmill reaches a particular speed, a third space is also created as the deep space of the picture plane fragments and becomes a two dimensional abstract surface of colour and light.

A pseudo-documentary about the making of an 8mm porn film in Australia. Director Chris Cary provided a moralising prologue and epilogue to the film, with the rest of the material presenting, and considering, the thoughts and experiences of people involved in making the porn show. Helen Mason plays herself, auditioning for a role in the porn film because she's unemployed and she hopes that the part may lead to other acting opportunities, like Jane Fonda in Klute.

Traumatografo is a film, the principal purpose of which is to comfort those who fear death by the gallows or scaffold. It is divided into three parts: in the first, slaughter by automobile is shown; in the third, by military engagements; in the center section children pantomime syncopated movements from top to bottom. The secret, twilight imaginings of a wreckless character in the horrifying motion of falling or ejection in triplicate from an auto-trauma-mobile, the alternation—through the manipulation—of his original motion, offers us, as a source of comfort, the bicorporeal vision of him as he travels along the parabola of his fall from a residual sequence of a most personal and fatal leap.

Nirdosh overview.

Repertory consists of one continuous tracking shot, during which the camera completely circles the outside of a locked and empty theatre, whilst a voice describes a three week programme of daily ‘imagined presentations’ inside the theatre.

Montage of clips from various horror films set to Frank Sinatra's Strangers in the Night

All part of a series called LOGICAL PROPOSITIONS. The simple aim of this series was to didactically select several elements of film naturalism, which work to create the illusion of representation on screen, and make each the subject of a self-descriptive film using that element as subject and demonstration. So Lip sync is about sync sound and the disruption of it, Deep Space is about camera stability and invisibility of the camera apparatus, and Lens Tissue is about clarity of the image and focus. Each of them works by disrupting the element and foregrounding the effect on film, and flattening the representation from image to projected filmstrip.

Iranian film directed by Gholam Hosain Taheridust.

Van der Keuken juxtaposes images of Dutch children learning to read against those of the coup d'état in Chile.

Bollywood 1973