Cinematic Era: 1977 Vintage

Karl Cohen's promo for Flight to the Future shows with music by George Mundy.

Tony Labat emerged in 1977 with the remarkable series Solo Flight in which the artist’s identity is given sudden form through subtle ethnic gestures.

"A sculptural and quasi-performance piece involving discarded Christmas trees. A meditation on passing and the things-left-behind." –RM

"I used to wander the streets of Vancouver very early in the morning experiencing sights, sounds and people going about their business. Somewhere along the way I imagined a narrative attempting to be genuine." –RM

The Spirit of Banking shows Arthur Scrooge the error of his ways.

During the Emergency Girdharilal Kapoor flees from India to live in Britain, assumes the identity of Swami Prem Baba but still carries on selling cocaine. When he finds out CBI Inspector Prasad Sinha has been assigned to apprehend him, he abducts his Britain-based daughter, Poonam, and holds her for ransom. He then travels to India, steals a diamond necklace from Palanpur's Maharani, and even offers prayers at Sinha's residence. This is where Prasad's wife, Sudha, gets the news that Poonam has been involved in an accident and decides to go there immediately. Prasad asks Poonam's fiancé, CBI Agent Vinod to accompany her - which he does - not realizing that both their lives will be placed in jeopardy and neither may return home in one piece.

A man isolated in a room seeks refuge in his imagination via trompe l'oeil effects.

Alan Lomax and his associates, beginning in the late 1950s undertook a monumental study of the relationship between style in song and dance cross-culturally. It began with Cantometrics which developed a common language description for the many variables in performance style in the diverse cultures of the world and measured how those variables clustered geographically and in relation to means of subsistence and aspects of social organization. Choreometrics continued this investigation into dance and movement. A continuation of Alan Lomax & Forrestine Paulay's Choreometrics project, this film examines the use of the foot in dance cross culturally. Though this film comes from later in the project, below is an interesting article written by Lomax about the methodology he was developing for this sort of film.

The nearly two-hour film Origin of The Night (Amazon Cosmos) (shot between 1973–1977 and finished in 1982), which references a myth of the indigenous Tupi people, is a meditation on the South American rain forest that was filmed in its entirety along the Rhine near Düsseldorf Airport. In it, the dichotomies of day and night, new and old worlds, and nature and culture unfold glacially and immersively. Only at the very end, in the film’s closing credits, does Baumgarten reveal where the compelling and poetic images were shot.

Through the use of a time lapse effect (single frame shots), the changes in a face covered with a cream cheese mask for 30 minutes are condensed into one minute. (E.S.jr.)

The room is dark and a recording of 14 tuning forks is playing in the room. The subject is asked to lie on a cot and relax. An overhead spotlight illuminates the face. She is asked to imagine a soft focus screen behind her eyelids where images will come and go and she is to describe what she sees. She is then told that she "will very soon" experience a violent form of death and I ask her if she is surprised this is happening to her. A consistent set of conditions begin to set in and the dialogue description of the images she is seeing and experiencing takes place. A mild form of hypnosis seems to set in.

A recording of a clock ticking for 7 minutes.

Sequences of magazine advertisements from the seventies create a fantastical and erotic universe.

"As Guy Fihman said, Bruine Squamma is also the story of a woman (N.K.) coming out of her house (Mozart House) speeding (tunnels) to join a man (Bléneau + cloud). And yet I wanted the shape of the film to be the furthest, the most secant, the most tenuous possible, a continuum of beats where fluctuate incessant metamorphoses swirls. I wanted to travel in a shaky and fixed form, states that continue to wither and get caught in unfixable beats." --Claudine Eizykman

Carlito, a bank clerk in Rio de Janeiro, is an engrained megalomaniac. Aided by his girlfriend Marta, he executes a wild plan that involves Milton de Souza, a married businessman, director of a factory.

A film based on the exhibition organized by the National Gallery that toured Canada in 1975. The paintings are juxtaposed with black-and-white newsreel footage of the more obvious social realities during the years of the Depression. The film shows that the artists of the day, in spite of economic setbacks, produced an inspired body of work.

Documentary film.

Putting a camera between myself and my life. It can go badly. Cinema as a thérapy.

A fairytale about a dragon.

One of a series of films that uses soundtracks generated directly from their own imagery. I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonics. – G.S.

Railway tracks seen from a speeding train are converted into optical sounds.

Sometimes Hannelore wishes she were a Hans, because “when a woman has to deal with a lot of men, she has to summon up a lot of strength to be heard”. The mayor of the island of Ummanz off Rügen used to be a cook. Now she represents the government and demonstrates “socialist democracy in action”. Director Róza Berger-Fiedler weaves Madam Mayor’s encounters with her constituency and discussions about the office with all its responsibilities into a sensitive portrait of a dedicated person.

An ethnographic study of a Turkana family filmed in north western Kenya in the early 1970's.

The new kid in town must decide whether or not he wants to be friends with a social outcast.

Documentary short.

This film was conceived about 10 years ago when I heard Norman O. Brown define "Tragedy" as "goat-song" (or as Webster has it: "Greek tragoidia fr. tragos goat + aiedein to sing; prob. fr. the satyrs represented by the original chorus"). I disagree with the last part of the Webster explanation and tend to think that the quality of sound of goats crying did prompt the Greeks to choose this term for their drama. In any case, the film TRAGOEDIA is also ironic (thus, perhaps the Latin of its title) as often is goat "lamentation"; and finally I should quote this from O.E.D.: "As to the reason of the name many theories have been offered, some even disputing the connexion with 'goat.'"

Tired of the city life, the Botha family decides to move to the bush veld. The farm Kom Tot Rus is the ideal place, but then intrigues begin to unfold.

A story by Alphonse Daudet about a hunting-scene seen through the eyes of a partridge. (Wim Schlebaum)

A documentary about the underground newspaper, 'Good Times,' featuring The Floating Lotus Opera Company, The Berkeley Astrology Guild and the Good Times Commune.

The films of Jorge O Mourão, a collection of autobiographical performance pieces, constitute visceral reactions to the authoritarian regime in Brazil and channel the paranoia and claustrophobia of his generation through the disjunction of sound and image.

A study of sunlight refracted through drinking glasses.

Treating the problem of anorexia nervosa from the parents' perspective, Rosler presents a mother and father speaking about the tragedy of their daughter's death as a result of dieting. The conversation turns toward the irony of self-starvation in a land of plenty and toward the international politics of food, where food aid is used as a negotiating tool. Confronting a serious issue, Rosler simultaneously sets into play the confessional form and the ghoulish staginess of talk show dramatics.

Super8, colour, silent.

A subjective account of the act of making still photographs.

Viola describes The Wheel of Becoming as concerning "the notion of the parallel nature of reality, that is, simultaneous events separated in space." A mandala-like form, divided into four quadrants, unifies four events by four individuals in four separate spaces. These alternately converge and separate through timed camera movements, coincident actions and common elements of the landscape.

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers is a collection of works that address the desire to transcend the perceptual and cognitive structures of experience.

Matta-Clark made a cut in a five-story commercial building located in front of the Steen, a tourist spot in Antwerp. (On Matta-Clark's death shortly after, an attempt was made to save the work as a future museum of contemporary art, but the building was demolished.)

'Flow' deals with the constant physical flow of atmosphere and fluids as related to the flow of electron beams and progression of form and colour in the video image.

Art film part of the REWIND + PLAY, An Anthology of Early British Video Art box-set.

Romanian Experimental Cinema

Young recruits in the military.

A woman hides in the forest, attempting to become one with the landscape.

Explore the rich history of Melbourne through the National Gallery of Victoria site in St Kilda Road, Melbourne, via its various uses, as a circus site in 1887 to the landmark cultural centre it became. Mixes found footage, stills and contemporary footage.

This is the expanded edition of the ultimate critical guide to Supertramp. The DVD spans the entire output of the band during the Hodgson years. This is the ultimate critical review of Supertramp during the years when the creative partnership of Davies and Hodgson propelled the band to world fame. Drawing on rare concert performances together with the views of a leading team of working musicians and critics, this highly entertaining and informative journey into the music of a great band is essential viewing for Supertramp fans everywhere Featured tracks include Dreamer, School, Bloody Well Right, Rudy, Give a Little Bit, The Logical Song, Lady and many more.

BBC TV Special broadcast on Apr 26, 1977. Recorded live at Old Grey Whistle Test Studio. Setlist: (1) Bob Harris Introduction, (2) Hello Old Friend, (3) Sign Language (4) Alberta, Alberta, (5) Tell The Truth, (6) Can't Find My Way Home (vocals Yvonne Elliman), (7) Double Trouble, (8) I Shot The Sheriff, (9) Knocking On Heaven's Door, (10) Further Up The Road, (11) Badge. Musicians: George Terry (Guitar), Dicks Sims (Keyboards), Carl Radle (Bass), Jamie Oldaker (Drums), Sergio Pastora Rodriguez (Percussion), Yvonne Elliman (Backing Vocals), Marcy Levy (Backing Vocals)

Directed by Abd al-Mun'im Uthman.

Short experimental animation by István Orosz.

Full film record explores a pre-Columbian tradition of folk therapy known as in northern Peru. Based on seven years of ethnographic research by Douglas Sharon, the footage documents the activities of Eduardo Calderon, a Peruvian fisherman, ceramacist and (healer). Scenes of the healer in various daily interactions with members of his family and local community illustrate the impact of Eduardo's charismatic personality and serve to underscore the importance which a specific cultural context has upon the diagnostic and healing process. Also explored is the importance of the local pre-Columbian ceramic art and iconography to Eduardo's healing practice; the use of herbs (including the San Pedro cactus), divination with the use of a live guinea pig, and the various ritual manipulations of the healer on his (table). Featured are scenes from a number of "seances" or curing ceremonies. The edited film EDUARDO THE HEALER was produced from this footage.

An avant-garde meditation on the principles of the I Ching.

Bollywood 1977

Bollywood 1977

Bollywood 1977