Cinematic Era: 1976 Vintage

A film based on Beyond a Boundary, the classic book by C. L. R. James,

Bruce Wood studied painting, printmaking, and filmmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA) and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA), to study filmmaking under Stan Brakhage. "Despite the many threads to be found in Wood's films, they aren't "poor copies" of other artists' work - he has a style and feel that seems quite unique and individual" –White Light Cinema

Silent film by Ken Jacobs featuring his son asleep at the table then being put to bed.

Camera, Monitor, Frame is the first installment of Takahiko Iimura's "Video Semiotics Triptych" (the other two works are Observer/Observed, made in 1975, and Observer/Observed/Observer, made in 1976). The work analyzes the fundamental components of video: the camera, the monitor, and the frame, focusing on the role of each within a system of video as analogous to the functions of vision and speech.

Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain is the story of a boy who dreams of being a sailor. Based on the well known children’s book by Edward Ardizzone.

The film touches on the problems of adolescence among the Polish youth.

Set in Hong Kong, the narcotics documentary Opium: The White Powder Opera (1976-77) was commissioned by a British television station. Yung, its associate producer and cinematographer, joined the surveillance team of the Narcotics Bureau to acquaint himself with the workings of the drug trade. This paved the way for The System. In addition to the cat-and-mouse game between the cops and the druglord, a fascinating thread traces the relationship among dealers, junkies and mules in Sai Ying Pun. The title hails from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, another tragedy concerned with a capitalist society’s oppressed and exploited nobodies.

Silent short film by Guy Sherwin as part of his Short Film series in which he captures everyday life, diary like subjects.

A 1976 Filipino film starring Nida Blanca and Eddie Rodriguez.

A two-channel installation from the Modern Television Loop series. Rock Garden shows two continuous shots of stone piles. On one monitor we see a close-up of hands grasping stones off the pile and tossing them off until the pile dwindles. The second monitor is a long shot of tossing stones to yet another pile.

Trace is an impressional story about the artistic practice of Alina Szapocznikow, recorded three years after the artist’s untimely death. Film director Helena Włodarczyk took the artist's sculptures hailing from various stages of her work to a metropolitan avenue. Even in highly urbanised surroundings, the works by Szapocznikow still seem imbued with the physical. An important role is played by formal experiments of the artist (e.g. sculptures of polyester). “I like to work with materials in which every touch leaves a trace. This physical contact with the matter gives me the sense of handing myself over to the sculpture”, as Szapocznikow explained. The title of the film refers to that very statement.

In a mountain village, two kids find a roman fibulae. Trying to find more, they stumble upon the notes of a history professor about a Roman settlement Lisidava. They are trying to locate it.

Documents the demolition of the Mendes Caldeira Building in São Paulo, Brazil on November 16th, 1975, being at the time, one of the tallest and largest buildings ever imploded in the world, after the implosions of many structures such as the Traymore Hotel (Atlantic City, USA, 1972).

A polemical report on wealthy German-speaking residents of Namibia who revel in memories of the colonial era and support the apartheid policy of racial segregation. In contrast, the film depicts the miserable living conditions of the indigenous population, who sell their labor to white people for meager wages to ensure the survival of their families crammed together in reservations.

Two friends who grew up together since childhood remain inseparable even in their youth. One of them falls in love with a girl who is also desired by a vicious criminal. Through deceit, the criminal causes his rival to be arrested and tricks the girl. Driven to despair, she attempts suicide, but her beloved’s friend saves her and, in order to protect her honor, enters into a marriage of convenience with her...

Documentary dedicated to Manuel Tito Benitez, a volunteer member of the Student Federation of Panama who died in an accident while performing volunteer work in the remote region of Coclesito. The film depicts this experience and testifies to the efforts of the students in the struggle for national liberation.

Sequence of animations and random footage (Olympic torch lighting, rituals etc) which were "based on ideas of Hans Hollein; created for the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum's opening exhibition: Man transForms", 1976. Nine designers worked with Hans Hollein in the "MAN TRANSFORMs" exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design: Nader Ardalan, Peter Bode, Buckminster Fuller, Murray Grigor, Arata Isozaki, Richard Meier, Karl Schlamminger, Ettore Sottsass, and Oswald Ungers.

The parable of a flock of sheep that defeated a pack of wolves.

The last episode of this passion, the opening of the cinema theater "l'Entrepôt" in Paris is an opportunity to dream even more about the possibilities offered by this profession. Before passing to the other side of the screen, in the arms of Michèle Morgan or the first steps in the cinema of a little boy named Frédéric Mitterrand.

Vilma Santos did Mga Rosas Sa Putikan for her own VS Films where she played a country girl forced into prostitution in the big city. The movie did fairly well at the tills. Good sign…” – Ricardo F. Lo, Expressweek, Jan 19 1978

Animated short film promoting the Andean Pact, which was formed by the Cartagena agreement (1969) by a group of countries in the Andean area, appealing to South American unity as the basis for the region's development.

An alienated and lonely man goes to take a rest and dreams about the same torment and feeling of inability to bear the burdens of life that torment him even when he is awake. He dreams of his ups and downs, as well as fears which turned into symbols that also came from the rigid everyday reality.

At the heart of an upper-middle class family resides a bizarre love triangle. Two men, one woman. An essay on the various possibilities and rituals of recent freedom, Os Demónios da Liberdade is also a manifest of sexual freedom. But the demons are still around.

A young man calls his friend, goes to war, returns wounded and reunites with his friend.

A mother takes her lazy son out of the house to work, the boy is on his sightseeing while lying by the river, notices flowers that are on the water, the flowers come from a garden where a young girl is imprisoned by a demon.

A portrait of Thornton’s sister and a close friend. Shot while studying with cinema verite masters Ed Pincus & Richard Leacock, this early film transgressed documentary norms, shaping its portrait of two women with a formal, almost musical editing schema.

A film by Ana Mendieta

Documentary film.

Using a felt-tip pen, Partum draws geometric figures on a TV screen which displays a news broadcast filled with propaganda delivered by the country’s counter-revolutionary party leaders. The artist lays bare the propaganda message of the media and their ideologisation.

This is a example of early video art using the color capability of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor - the "Color IP".

To mark his 70th Birthday, the Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, recalls key moments from his childhood and adolescence.

Margit's 17-year-old son Glenn gives her a small demonstration of daring to protest and not to be henpecked.

A cascading tapestry of sight and sound, rejecting nothing, clinging to nothing, saturating and ultimately defeating the discriminating mind, until unstructured primary space begins to unfold within the viewer.

A test film shot in super 8 mm and 16 mm inflated for copying. A first film "long", made with nothing, "hypnotic", slow and repetitive as it was at the time fascinating and usual to do, as an exercise in style mandatory. A period film.

An ear of wheat is taken by a bird.

The story of the highwayman and folk hero, Juraj Janosik.

An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman.

Unique story of a village's attempts to solve drought by appealing to the powers of a mysterious mountain-dwelling diviner.

Prosopographia, 1976. 16mm film, color, sound; 5 minutes (unfinished).

Beginning with the grounded view of bare feet walking through shallow surf, the film then seizes and, in successively cumulative layers adds frames of image-within-image until we are watching the walking feet through a tunnel. The Dutchman's Photographs becomes a kinetic reiteration of itself and in doing so, succinctly detaches from spatial illusion, beginning a temporal experiment where still photographs are transformed into cinematic "action".

For more than seventy-five years, the Chicago Maternity Center provided safe home deliveries for Chicago mothers. This film interweaves the history of the center with the stories of a young woman about to have her first baby and the center's fight to stay open in the face of the corporate takeover of medicine.

taiwan films

Sausages are smoked in a practically derelict house. For former farm worker Fritz Marti, who likes to meditate expansively on his life in his smokehouse, there is something philosophical about this activity. Lucienne Lanaz has lived in Grandval in the Bernese Jura since 1974. “Feu, fumée, saucisse” was her first documentary film, marking the beginning of an extensive production in which her talent for film portraits clearly stands out. The intimate yet respectful way in which she portrays Fritz Marti is as unique as the man himself.

This documentary depicts the conflict between hospital workers and the Quebec government in 1976. It features images of hospital workers in the workplace, and gives them a voice.

Man has evolved from the invention of the comb to the first step on the moon, but he still made a large box in the event of a cataclysm.

A fictional tale of a mother and a 17-year-old boy moving from countryside to city and the start of a new life in the middle of a concrete jungle.

"Boredom" consists of a series of images portraying the movements of one character. The character performs acts with no apparent reason or result. His life is his art. We watch him as he lives his day. He walks, he looks, he loves, he dreams. The subject "Boredom" is the title; all images are made as interesting as possible, but they have no exterior meaning.

First of all, the music. The music in Night and Day by Gianni Castaglioni is in the repetitive rhythm of the images, usually very rapid (with some suddenly slowed down, figements, yet with a fiery intensity). And as each shot, (brief like those of Mekas or Brakhage), moves,; as the camera moves to the nervous rhythm of a wrist, the music becomes a sort of Free Jazz — and not only visually, since the soundtrack is composed of piano frenzies à la Elton John. The extreme close-ups that sprinkle this sort of intimate journal and which are among the most admirable - as well as the most rapid - ever made in cinema, don’t float adrift like the film’s music through a hundred flowing veins.

1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

The second part of Judit Eleks long-term documentary about two girls and their lives in a small Hungarian village. What has become of their dreams and hopes?

DR. HAWAII is a film project made by Rock Ross and Michael Rudnick in the early 1970s while both were students at the San Francisco Art Institute. It is a unique sampler of all the various cameras, lenses, film equipment, techniques, filmstocks, editing, lighting, A/B/C/D roll FX, tricks and gimmicks. These various disciplines were incorporated into the film as they were learned. The structure that all this hangs on is that of a man watching television and imagining he is the star of all the shows... also domestic tension raises the stress. There is no escape... or is there?