Cinematic Era: 1976 Vintage

A group of marionettes in a neglected warehouse re-enact the story of the birth of Jesus.

TV Favorites Gather!! was a celebration of Japanese TV shows including tokusatsu.

The construction of a projected window in the basement.

Silent super-8mm film shot during Cha's time in France

A narrative of the establishment of the bronze foundry in the University of Tehran's sculpture department. The project was led by the renowned Iranian artist, Parviz Tanavoli.

Mike Wallace reports on Palestinian militancy.

The silent climber is a documentary about bouldering that takes place in Pueblo. It was directed by Pat Ament in 1976. It features John Gill and Jim Holloway.

The personality of Lazar Lečić, coach of the basketball club “Rabotnički” from Skopje, is an example of enormous dynamism and professionalism in his work. Following his reactions during a basketball game, we witness a real drama filled to the maximum with a variety of emotions and gestures. His face fully and in a very characteristic way expresses everything that happens on the court.

Blue Studio: Five Segments is a groundbreaking work of videodance by postmodern master Merce Cunningham and his then filmmaker-in-residence, Charles Atlas. In a series of short pieces choreographed and performed specifically for video space, Cunningham is multiplied, overlaid and transported from the studio to a series of unexpected landscapes. Cunningham's gestural dance is manipulated to the accompaniment of a disjunctive audio collage that includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.

An experimental documentary. Using several series of static shots, the film depicts the lives of the residents of a housing estate.

Much of Anna Bella Geiger’s work engages with geography. She begins the video “Mapas elementares no. 1” by drawing the outline of a world map on paper. In the background, Brazilian musician Chico Buarque’s well-known song “Meu caro amigo,” released the same year, accompanies her activity. Though it sounds cheerful, Buarque’s song is written as a letter to a friend in exile. It mixes references to everyday life (soccer, samba, music, rain, and sun) with statements such as, “What I really want to tell you is that things here are black,” an allusion to the dark circumstances surrounding the heightened violence and censorship under Brazil’s military regime. Buarque’s refrain prompts Geiger to begin blackening the outline of Brazil on her map. Geiger includes herself to demonstrate that the drawing of maps depends heavily on the mapmaker’s vision, or “the artist’s hand.” Her use of video to record the process further emphasizes that mapping is always contingent and in-progress.

Iranian comedy about a talking dog

A grotesque about avid smokers, unable to quit their addiction.

An Italian count travels to Greece and discovers a magical cave with water that enhances sexual vitality. The count engages in a flurry of activity, pleasing his wife, mistress, and a young hotel maid.

Performance by Valie Export.

An experimental film which attempts to develop a sense of 'actual physical time' relative to the events observed, recorded within the original camera direction.

An allegorical fantasy about a woman plagued by her fear of the passage of time and the prospect of her beauty ever fading.

A man addresses the strangers on a street, he asks them to talk to him. The strangers refuse under various excuses, but later on they are looking for the people to talk to in a meetings club.

Banchong Kosalwat, a pioneer of Thai experimental film, created this empathetic documentary on racehorses while he was based in the United States. He presents a racehorse’s life from birth to death. Various oral interviews of those involved in the racing industry are combined with footage of horses forced to comply with their cruel fate. Pacer, titled after horses’ man-made gait of pacing, appeals for compassion, asking for more than a utilitarian relationship to animals for entertainment and greed.

Construction of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The rabbit becomes a friend with a pink balloon. An evil hunter appears who wants to shoot the rabbit. The balloon lifts the rabbit into the sky. They reach a planet that looks like a cabbage. The rabbit is hungry. It's eating up the planet. They return to earth. There's a hunter waiting for them. He raises his gun, but the balloon hides his friend. The bullet breaks the balloon to pieces. The resin drips from the pine like a tear. With it, the rabbit sticks his faithful friend.

Tom Joe, a kite maker, recreates the folklore of Asian kites by illustrating magnificent stories from China, Japan and Polynesia.

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.

Shot in one continuous take and exclusively featuring Dana Hodgon's face and voice as he delivers an ironically edited monologue.

Produced by the Los Angeles Women's Video Center in 1976, this public service announcement reminded viewers that lesbians are present in every job occupation, including your own.

A feature film in episodes produced by Walt Disney Productions in 1976.

A basic composition of brick wall and man seated facing the camera, laughing his head off. No temporal or narrative framing is ever given , it is just the person, the action, and the manipulation of the sound and image that describe the conditions of being in front of and behind the camera.

An artist attempts to draw but has difficulty reconciling what he sees with what he hears.

Unpacking a drawer, with its heterogeneous contents, of a secretary in an office, relentless repetition of the words "My name is Didier Ozil" illustrated by the images on the wall of his apartment, tailing consumers on a Saturday afternoon in the streets of Lyon, and the overflowing of garbage cans on the sidewalks of the city center.

Footage and discussion concerning the history of the Langholm Common Riding. Discussion between Hugh MacDiarmid and Hamish Henderson on topics such as Scots socialism and nationalism.

This film chronicles an artistic and personal quest through an assortment of in-camera and optical printing experiments. Shutter effects and swarming dots fragment the filmic surface so the picture oscillates between abstraction and recognition. The soundtrack quotes excerpts from anthropologist Franz Boas’ 1930 text about a Kwakiutl Indian shaman. The story serves as a metaphor for the struggle of the artist practicing a new visual language. In the Boas text, a man relates his learning the ways of a shaman. Doubting the magic in shamanistic practice, he strives to understand traditional methods in order to discover the truth. Though he learns the secrets of his teachers and finds only tricks, he nonetheless becomes a powerful and famous shaman himself. This film is about the desire to master the magic of the image while following a path of doubt and skepticism.

British Public Information Film detailing how to behave during the rabies outbreak of 1976.

A short film by Peter Bundy

A cartoon from a series of so-called cartoons for adults. The cartoon consists of three parts.

A taxonomy of manipulation, gesture, and touch for a computer research project with touch-sensitive displays, Super 8 film, MIT Architecture Machine Group.

“Wedding in Leresti: American couple gets married in the Orthodox tradition as local priest is appointed Texan sheriff” – this was the title of a feature published in the August 1973 issue of Tribuna României, a trilingual (French-English-German) Romanian publication targeted at foreign audiences. The unusual event was documented in a Sahia film commissioned by Publiturism, the media arm of Romania’s National Tourism Office, which credited Paul Anghel, the editor-in-chief of the periodical, as scriptwriter.

This immersive experimental film work demonstrates the influence of collage and psychedelic light shows. Constructed using the Debrie contact printer at the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative, it employs a musical and associative editing style, introducing colour-fields and symmetrical effects that transform the diverse source material. Stuart Pound’s transitions gently toy with the viewer’s perception.

This fun travelogue takes us to Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida.

Local community activists interview tenants of Murchison Road, London, W10, about the negative impact of local building works on their lives. It was presented to the Local Council.

A cat climbs a screen, men squat on the pavement to gamble behind a 7-11, solarized film warbles in and out. A personal, quiet diary film, portraying an early apartment, an early cat, an early relationship in Kansas City. Uses self-conscious Eisenstein cutting to convey the indolent, charged air-before-a-storm atmosphere that pervaded that era.

A black briefcase accompanies a child in his life from the very moment of his birth. He devotes all his attention to the case. Nothing can distract him: not a girl on a swing, not a funny clown. The hero resists various temptations - sports, women, restaurants, fishing, travel. Because of his passion for the briefcase, he remains indifferent to those in need of help. When he gets old, he opens the briefcase and realizes that it is his coffin.

A weirdly humorous birth film with leaden symbolism, flying eggs, and a churchfull of soaring helium balloons.

When a working woman finds a construction spike, it inadvertently brings out the best in her diverse neighbors' communal generosity and provision. An exacting parable of who this new community chooses to include and exclude.

Malnutrition is a product of the unfair distribution of wealth, the filmmaker tells us. A documentary film that highlights the irreversible physical and mental damage caused by chronic malnutrition among the Mexican people.

Drugs, love, and violence: the fierce will to live of a certain youth in downtown Rouyn-Noranda during the 1970s. A young pusher meets an old college friend who has since become an actress, now touring the region. His world is that of the Rouyn dropouts; she aspires to other worlds and other dreams. The connection between them is no longer possible.

The film documents the work of the primitive painter Chico da Silva seen in his neighborhood, with his people, his world, his life. Chico da Silva's painting, inspired by the fight between birds, fish and dragons originating from his prodigious fantasy, is presented in flash comparing his paintings with leisure movements from his daily life and subsequently analyzing his technique and style at the time that paints. The film has surprising statements from the painter about his life and life.

Not only can the egg be smarter than the hen, but it is also possible for the hen to scatter into tiny pieces while the egg remains intact.

Borba u Njujorku was shot in October and November 1976 in New York. The film consists of 12 parts organised around the subject of ‘art and society’, with a strong anti-capitalist message.

A César award nominated short drama.

An imaginative, animated adaptation of Sándor Petőfi’s comedy epic using folk motifs and elements of modern painting, with visual means only. Enemies of the village blacksmith lock him in the church because there is a plot to win over his lover, the pub owner. The blacksmith breaks free, catches the seducer red-handed and a heated punch-up ensues. Finally, the local magistrate arrives and dispenses justice.

A 16 mm film shot in three sequences. First exhibited at Winchester School of Art in 1976, then at the New Contemporaries– Live Show, Acme Gallery in London (1976). The film was sent to the International Festival of Women Artists, Film Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1980. It languished in the archives in Denmark until its re-discovery by the KØN – Gender Museum Denmark in 2021. A new 4k digital scan was made by the DJCAD Media Preservation Lab at the University of Dundee in October 2021.

Short documentary.

A parody of a movie, including commercials and a surreal trailer. They are the striking prologue to a disappointing film, which consists of the presentation of the characters of a story that is not told. The type of estrangement that the director seeks, to which is added the direct appeal to the public, is a questioning of the role that this type of spectacle assigns to the spectator, and of the conditions that make him distinguish cinema itself from advertising and allow him to enjoy detective narrative. The mockery, moreover, is directed equally at the consumer society and at the radicals who believe they can combat it with graffiti.