Cinematic Era: 1977 Vintage

Stretched across the sky until the film bursts.

A short film by Katsuhiro Yamaguchi.

Festival of Avignon 1977. In the main courtyard of the Popes' Palace, actors rehearse a play by Shakespeare, Coriolan. The director is inspired by this text and the history of the landscape of Provence to question the imaginary threads that link all these elements and that "make theater". "Theater is a film about the relationship between theater and history. First, there is Coriolan, Shakespeare's play about a Roman dictator's rise to power, there are the landscapes of Provence, there are the actors who rehearse the play in Avignon. And two voices, that of a man and that of a woman who speak to each other. While the reality of the actors' work builds the documentary side of the film, this fictional dialogue resonates with the landscapes that contain so many traces and stories. The film, playful and joyful, explores the narrative possibilities of cinema." - Catherine Bizern

An overview of six pooches interacting at an all-dog birthday party. A prizewinner in the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival that documents the lack of discipline possible when dogs establish a pecking order (shot in time-lapse so that the basic rhythms and patterns of the dogs' movements are more apparent).

Shown at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

50 good films

An experimental film by Jenny E. Davidson

Animated peanuts engage in human activities which illustrate the basic principles of economics. Captain Silas trades local trucks for sugar cubes quarried on the Isle of Sugar. Traveling in his wing-tip shoe of a boat on a blue and white pop-corn sea, a storm destroys his cargo. He saves a shaving-brush dolphin from a red washcloth sea monster, puts the dolphin in a marine circus, earns a circus truck and is back in business.

"Yesterday I took another look at the three film prints I own by Gary Doberman, FISHERIES, THE RHYME and THE MOIETIES and satisfied myself that, yes, the last several years his work has been THE most persistent influence on my films ...." - Stan Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook

A process of gradual revelation - while it is not a measured and sequential revelation, the viewer must collect and correlate fragments of visual information - initially the "view" is restricted by the limitations of the camera lens and its angle of acceptance and then the application of the mask systems re-orders and further restricts it.

A performer enters carrying a bucket of what appears to be black paint (the film is in negative). He begins to paint lines on what seems to be a white wall. The lines become a 2D representation of a cube. The next image is a "wall" of paper. It is cut away from behind and another cube is gradually revealed in the background. The performer leaves the scene to the side. He re-enters the scene from the left, in the foreground. He then destroys parts of the foreground cube by cutting it away. This reveals the fact that the cube is not flat but suspended in space. He again leaves the scene from the left only to re-appear in the rear of the scene. He then draws in the lines of the foreground cube at the rear of the space. He then returns to the foreground and completes the cutting away of the foreground cube. Upon completion of this he returns to the rear and fills in the foreground lines. The film ends after he fills in one side of each cube with solid black

Primary Stimulus is an integrated sound-image structure which explores the intrinsic qualities of cinematic light. The abstract patterns which are seen on the screen when Primary Stimulus is projected are the same patterns which create the film’s accompanying soundtrack. My aim in Primary Stimulus, however, was not merely to create the effect of "seeing sound." but rather, in a larger sense, to further develop the cinematic potential of non-objective light as a free and viable tool for audio-visual action. By using the film frame as a consolidated unit, sound and image issue from a single center and interpenetrate in a way which is not limited by the structural conventions of music or pictorial form. It was, therefore, my intention in Primary Stimulus to exploit the freedom of this holistic cinematic concept, and to create an expressive animated work based on the frame-by-frame articulation of sight and sound relationships. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

A scientist arrives from Eastern Europe to London. A man, hired to kill her, takes up a sniping position in a terraced rooming-house opposite the building in which the scientist is closeted with an interrogator.

Mexican feature film

This is about my hometown, using the local obsession with cars as a means to show the place. People get work manufacturing car parts and have to own cars to get work, get groceries, get off, around, anywhere, or anything. We invest into cars tremendous amounts of money, love, skill, and creative imagination, and use it all to go 'round...' 'Doing a hardman,' a theme in the film means making a U-turn at one end of the main street, part of the 15-block circuit where drivers parade continuously from noon until midnight, on show, looking for action. –K. M.

A film by Gary Adkins

An early film by Dietmar Brehm.

Philly documents a 1976 performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which Wilke interacts with Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass. Edited by John Sanborn, the piece juxtaposes behind-the-scenes dialogue and preparations with the performance itself, showing us a playful Wilke.

The short film Al Dhareeh (1977) by Eltayeb Mahdi, founding member of the Sudanese Film Group, tells the story of a man who claims to be able to heal people.

Rasool, a printing press worker, at the advice of his sincere friend in the classroom. A night's diary finds a girl named Honey, in which she writes that her parents and her parents have died and she is living with her stepmother, and she wants to commit suicide because of her stepmother's stepmother.

Eclamorphoses balances a loop of sound (by La Monte Young) with loops of visual material derived from re-photographed slides of amorphous painted abstractions which are carefully and systematically permuted by super-impositions, scratches, punctures, slices, reticulated paint-on-the-film-strip, step-printing, changes of projector speed, and finally zooming of the image with the projector lens and live manipulation of the projector and light beam (with a hand-held prism).

"Chronoma was conceived as a follow-up to Rythmes 76: its composition is still inspired by the repetitive processes of Steve Reich's music, with their gradual progression. This time, we have a sequence of photographs taken with a motorized camera (a proto movie camera) in a circular movement around a high-voltage electric tower in northern Paris. The initial image is in itself a drawing of lines intersecting to form angles." -JMB

A short which teaches kids about race.

Provincetown, Cape Cod. A reconstructed 'landscape' ... inspired by a drive down 6A. The norm when driving of watching the landscape approaching and receding, and the side-show of dioramas.

A documentary on politician Francisco Pinto's return to his hometown of Feira de Santana.

A film directed by Ion Grigorescu

With Esmeralda, Hernandez shifts to the romantic mythology, but this descriptive aspect is secondary in the filmmaker's work, whose purpose is the constitution, by interposed myths, of a baroque cinematographic language. From this point of view, he joins the approaches of other contemporary filmmakers like Bene or Schroeter. In Esmeralda, he introduces masks from his creation to work on the physical and not only the filmic material. But Hernandez adds to his series of aesthetic variations of "stock-shots" of war plans, desolations, genocides, which brutally fall within the visual framework of his film. The filmmaker thus points out the cracks that overflow the myth in its darkest areas: the historical and social reality that obsesses us, that terrorizes us every moment.

In this experimental video project, originally broadcast on the ZDF television art program "Aspekte," artist Richard Kriesche appears on a TV monitor and delivers an artist statement about the invisible wall between artist and spectator in the televisual medium. Kriesche then paints over a glass canvas, the very invisible wall, between himself and the camera, just as he reappears in front of the TV monitor and delivers the same artist statement. After this, Kriesche paints over the glass of the TV monitor with blue paint, acting as a chrome key effect that slowly uncovers the original image of Kriesche on the monitor, now seeming to drip as the blue paint spills over and Kriesche delivers his statement a third and final time.

Illustrates techniques for emergency treatment of choking victims. Techniques are shown for adults, children, infants, self, and unconscious victims.

"Oh––senseless acrobatics, cart-wheels in mid-air, unheard of songs they sing, distal the midnight vapors into wine––do pagan dances!"

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.

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.

TV Fighter (CAM-ERA-PLANE), 1977 plays with the experiences of real-time and the video copy, presenting in several iterations a fragment of World War II footage taken from the point of view of a fighter plane as it machine-guns targets on land and sea. Using a Russian-doll structure of images repeatedly rerecorded and reframed, Hall toys with the viewer’s manifold experiences of live and recorded time: the historical time of archival footage, the live experience of watching it on a screen, the déjà vu of watching that “live” footage again on another monitor. This nesting of recorded images within other recorded images implies an emergent sensibility in which the present moment is continually being recorded and reframed by audiovisual apparatus, but crucially Hall’s approach to this phenomenon is as playful as it is provocative. (artforum)

The Deutsche Staatsoper Unter den Linden is presented together with some of its best and most popular singers. A program of famous opera arias and scenes: Among others, Theo Adam sings Philipp's aria from Verdi's "Don Carlos", Peter Schreier the cavatina of Almaviva from Rossini's "Barber of Seville". Ute Trekel-Burkhardt and Isabella Nawe present a scene from Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier". The chorus and ballet also make their appearances. Between the numbers, the artists make statements about the opera house against the backdrop of the opera and its magnificent interiors.

Together with Godfried Talboom, Nilsson traveled around Europe with a commitment: to film something every day, without having planned anything. The film also creates context where context does not exist.

Bollywood 1977

Film starring Adoor Bhasi and Prem Nazir

Film starring Prem Nazir and Jayan

Bollywood 1977

Bollywood 1977

Film starring Bindu, Bindiya Goswami and Helen

Filmed in the multiple-mirrored women's bathroom of the New York City Holiday Inn--in which the most visible object was myself looking at myself, looking at... In pursuit of contradictions.

This installment of the Kung Fu Theater collection presents Men on the Hour (1977), a martial arts classic from the vaults of Hong Kong cinema. With rival clans flocking to carve their initials into the prestigious Hero Tower, there's bound to be some bloodshed in the process. Cliff Lok (One Armed Swordsman), Nora Miao (Fists of Fury and The Chinese Connection) and Lo Lieh (Five Fingers of Death) co-star.