Cinematic Era: 1977 Vintage

Sweeten offerings to the gods/ i thought everyone was honesty/ but they were a result of mirror/ meat/ a l a r g e r e d flash/ A –J. K.

carey burtt stop motion short film

Another energized detail of a filament in a red electric bulb.

This film depicts a world where space is geometric, noise is absent, and nothing happens until a small white cube comes bumping along, stirring up movement where before there was none. Chased by a wicked demon, the cube symbolizes the inner struggle that goes on inside each one of us: the confrontation, or evasion, of one's private demons.

Making short, silent, single-subject films allows the specific forms and movements to be savored without the burden of a distracting drama or explanation. Filmed in Hawaii.

After war broke out in Lebanon in April of 1975, few expected that it would spread to ruin the country and that it would still be continuing several years later.

A Portuguese film by Rogério Ceitil.

A documentary about a small touristic village in Algarve, Southern Portugal.

Begins as a whimsical piece with 'sheets' of lines running down the screen, progressing into more and more complex geometic patterns but without deviating from the basic precepts of 'dot and line' animation. Jazz piano on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and a spring color palette. -- Stephanie Sapienza. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2001.

The film explores the First Nations perspective on Thomas R. Berger's Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry of the mid-1970s.

Evolutionary film that focuses on culture and nature. Ants, Cézanne, Picasso, Sainte-Victoire, Avignon, Place de l'Horloge, Venice and its canals, Carmen, La Tosca, Gros Caillou de la Croix-Rousse, Toulouse, Mirail, swimming...

A drama in the continuum of perturbance in the mixed-gender relationship. Based on shoulder and hand symbolism as historical body language, the history of women in the world of men is broken wide open.

Experiemntal film projected over a painting.

A musical tale about the seasons.

Gerald Scarfe's animated interpretation of Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine". Produced in 1977 and projected behind the band on their "In The Flesh" tour, later released as a promotional video.

The world of Alagoas poet Jorge de Lima, author of unforgettable verses, is in O Grande Circo Místico, from 1977, directed by João Carlos Horta.

One year after his debut film Ein drittes Reich Alfred Kaiser edited another compilation essay with similar footage: Ein drittes Reich aus seinem Abfall, a classic succession film in the best sense which carries on, completes in a radical manner the aesthetic reflections of the first work. After the political-ironical critic of picture and ideology of the first part the second part totally disclaims the spoken watchword and "definite" montages: the ambivalence of the used "found footage" combined with contemporary hit-songs is pushed to extremes. Ein drittes Reich aus seinem Abfall: a highly intimate, musical round dance, supplied by Alfred Kaiser with the condition to present it only within the scope of a "private circle" or in immediate order to Ein drittes Reich.

"Good Evening Everybody" does not construct a world, but projects a personality. Burckhardt's camera observes life in a way characteristic of someone sensitive to irony, detail, diversity, humor, incongruity and (even) beauty, expressive of a cultivated, somewhat aloof, yet generous sensibility that suggests a perceptive, complicated and engaging, in fact ideal, traveling companion." Noel Carroll, SOHo News

A short 1977 documentary about the origins of our current folk art tradition.

"In this film there is a simple accessible constant which you will have no difficulty in recognizing. There is an equally apparent variable. So your question - to phrase it poorly - might be, what is it that is being measured here? The materials of this film are personal, comfortably so. Nothing in that way distorted or untoward. But the choices of the artist are both crucial and defining, and there is evident attention to what he has called boundaries. This ... is a beautiful film, factually, with a lovely shifting counterpoint in the pacing. Like an old slow blues, after some up-tempo number – so, read it and think." – Robert Creeley

portrays the Bruder working class family, whom she met during her time as a social worker in the Märkisches Viertel. Equipped with a Super-8 camera by Helga Reidemeister, the family had already begun filming their everyday life independently in the fall of 1969. However, when, together with Reidemeister, they looked through the four-hour material at the editing table in the summer of 1974, they realized that it depicted the family's problems only superficially and left the social context out of the picture. Reidemeister, who had not yet intervened in the film shooting, then spent a lot of time with the family and documented everyday life together with them. The result was a multi-layered mixture of family self-testimony and reflection on social relationships.

José Nascimento films the process of the Agrarian Reform that happened in the Portuguese region of Alentejo during the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution.

JOSHUA fears his shadow, until he finds the light bulb which controls it.

From Four Seasons is a four screen time-lapse film made as comparative study of changing light and movement in a garden shot in four seasons. The camera was positioned to frame a garden space by dividing it into four quarter sections one shot in the Summer and the other 3 in the Autumn, Winter and Spring. Each section of the film was shot ‘in camera’ as a time-lapse over a 24 hour period, including the night, at 1 frame every 25 seconds, creating a distinctive filmic register and viewing ‘rhythm’. Each film section was first projected on its own as a separate quarter, each moving sequentially in a clockwise direction within the projection area. In the last part of the film the four seasons are projected together to make up a whole image of the garden space.

The film consists of five different versions of the same scene.

A short film depicting Beirut during the civil war of Lebanon

Role play, based on the children's-youth tale by German-born writer Ilse Losa, 'The Blue Flower'. Filmed in the Alfama neighborhood, with the collaboration of residents of Rua da Galé, this is a story of friendship in a neighborhood, between children, an old lady and some jugglers. With the circus participation of Teresa Ricou.

“Cycles of 3s and 7s is a doubled statement. First and foremost, it is a commentary on computer art and the role of computers in video. Secondly, its arithmetic project has some bearing on the construction of musical scales. In reclaiming the computer as a performance instrument, I intended that the human operator must compete directly with the computer, doing what the computer does best. The selection of a simple hand calculator was a deliberate denial of the computer aesth/ethic of bigger, faster: computer art must be doable within even the most modest architecture. Cycles of 3s and 7s shows that it is not the answer that ‘counts,’ but the pleasure in getting there. Simple rote calculation is turned into rhythm and song; accuracy of gesture and count become a game. These are ‘stories’ about numbers, the kind machines should like to hear and tell—if they ‘liked.’” - Tony Conrad

A brazilian film about a doctor that finds the cure for madness.

Densité Optique I (Optical Density I) mark a chromatic decomposition of the image. The choice to show a scrolling film movie as an extreme slow motion, frame by frame voluntarily directs the gaze on the work of the image. This aesthetic can remember those photographs retouched by painting. However, this type of image is obtained by a chemical decomposition of the film emulsion. Indeed, it is composed of three colored layers deposited on a transparent plastic substrate. Light passing through these layers is tinged with the colors and optical density, recreates the images and colors of the frames. Certain mixtures of chemistries acids attack these layers in the decolorizer, diluting in different aspects.

A person sticks it out for 24 hours in front of the camera. Every ten minutes a short clip was recorded, 8 frames per second (which is then projected at a speed of 24 f.p.s.). The tiredness of 24 hours in a time lapse of 4 minutes. (E.S.jr.)

Propaganda documentary in which the Armed Forces try to justify the Argentinian military coup d'état of 1976.

Bye, Bye Love follows a pair of would-be Everly Brothers as they travel to New York for a 24 hour run at the big time.

Summer Medley uses realistic footage to create an organic pattern of bold colors, horizontal movements, and simplified forms. Inspired by Steve Reich's tape loops, the film is constructed from four out-of-sync film loops that combine and recombine to form variations of changing images. An 8mm collection of footage from a summer vacation in positive and negative color, is layered with a hi-contrast pairs of legs dancing to the music of Hamza El Din "Song With Tar," creating a puzzle where shapes add, subtract, and multiply in a medley of color-motion-form in time.

ÉGYPTE is a meditation on ancient time and space. Inspired by the Tibetan Tantric chants of the Lamas (which also comprises the sound track), this impressionistic piece presents the ancient sense of 'mystery' without recourse to narration or didactic (historical) interpretation.

Second from last outing for the gentleman thief.

Zal o Simorgh is an epic from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Zal is an albino new-born child. Sam as his father (The King) who has never seen an albino child, gets worried and his fear of gossip of people flares his anger and he orders that the new-born be left under the Alborz Mountain. Simorgh the mythical bird finds the naked and hungry baby and takes little Zal to its nest and looks after him until one day...

Professor tries to explain his patients's mental anomalies.

Hospital documentary on the testing of a medicine produced by a known pharmaceutical company on people considered psychiatrically calibrated that caused a "vascular storm" with horrible convulsions. Patients were discharged when they could make the fascist salute. Found at the market of the Fiera di Senigallia in Milan, signed by Grifi as ready-made.

The female universe through four female characters: a child, a prostitute who never appears, me and the other, the other and me. Inside. The texts: invasion of the female exterior.

According to the Bible, the first man walked on Earth at 5 minutes to 12 o’clock. It was Adam, and he lived 930 years. The clock has been showing 5 to 12 for a long time. The question is raised: till when? Because, once the count down starts, the end is unavoidable.

Educational film for students in the "Chemistry of radioactive transformations."

Is detox enough to save a young junkie?

A portrait of Tamara Dmitrievna Chistyakova, an outstanding seamstress who worked in the Leningrad association Pervomaiskaya Zarya and who was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1976. This is a story about the fate of a Leningrad girl who survived the Nazi siege of the city but lost her parents during the war. Brought up in a childen’s home, she acquired her profession at a vocational college and became renowned in the Soviet Union as the initiator of a competition for mastering complementary skills in the sewing industry.

Colonel Brulgraag has found the will of King Krijn XXIV of Schiermeeuwen. Whoever finds Krijn's Sword will be the new king. The colonel asks Sjors and Sjimmie to search for the sword so that it can be taken to a museum and not used by Krispijn to gain power.

Seven persons, who didn't go to work, stayed together all day long while looking for a gift to surprise their boss. (Wim Schlebaum)

Political texts from the journal In Search, edited by M.S. Arnoni (Wim Schlebaum)

"As if pictures could think! Einschlafgeschichten doesn't really speak of bridges or railroads but rather of two girls filling the space between daytime and dreamtime with a poetic game, an endless game, a game with no end. A game which can fade out without becoming fragmentary. "Are you asleep?", one of them asks at the end of a clip – and the final shot is of the two, asleep; the game is over. The girls are played by Lara and Anna, Farocki's daughters." - Hans J. Wulff