Cinematic Era: 1978 Vintage

Twelve different everyday events that become special and sometimes even absurd by virtue of their ordinariness.

Women, multiple images, ironic metamorphoses of sea, land and air - bodies that flow, crumble, evaporate...

Claude Duty

The film 'Mikkola - Motocross Master' emphasises the sheer professionalism of Heikki Mikkola and shows how he mastered two major 500c Motocross events during 1978. The races featured are the French Grand Prix held at Gaillefontaine in April and the Italian Grand Prix at Gallarate in June.

At venues such as Southern Exposure in San Francisco and Some Serious Business in Venice, California, Wiehl performed Arrowcatcher, creating a sculpture through shooting arrows into a rectangular structure that would visibly suspend their movement in time. He explored variations of form and multi-layer, parallel panes of material – cloth, Plexiglas, and glass with mirror base. Filmed with a high-speed military camera, the slow-motion film Arrowcatcher (1978) was screened prior to his live performance at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The sculpture remained on view as part of Exposures, one of the group exhibitions presented within the major overview The Floating Museum: Global Space Invasion II (1978). The Floating Museum (1975-78), founded and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, worked with Wiehl on his site-specific project A Month Becomes An Hour at The Foothills Community Planetarium in Los Altos, California.

The sixth in a group of eight “Visible Inventories” in various media (2 films, 2 photo grids, 1 videotape, and 2 natural light installations) which list or catalogue my personal fascinations with natural phenomena. (1974-9) A space filled with moving…a series of panning shots of motel rooms in which the film-maker stayed during semi-annual transcontinental auto trips – homogenous accommodations lacking locational cues. Superimposed over the screen image are the names of the towns in which the rooms are located and the car’s odometer reading at each location. The sound track consists of two Gertrude Stein texts: “America I Came and Here I Am” and “American Food and American Houses” both from 1935. The film counterpoints printed word, spoken text, and photographs giving the viewer the alternate options of reading, viewing, and listening. Funded in part by a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. – J.C.L.

Documentary on Mikhail Naimy (1889-1988)

A pregnant woman sitting near a window is replaced with a child, an adult and a senior citizen in subsequent edits, revealing the cycle of life.

Sequence shot of a caged bear at the Barranquilla zoo in Colombia, while one of the Pisan Cantos is being quoted in Ezra Pound's own voice.

Extract taken from the longer diary dealing with United States in the summer of '78.

Mis en pièces means in French taking into pieces, but it could mean to set up a play, or to deconstruct a play. The film is about a theater play which is shot against the medium theater. This film is an attempt to destroy the representation of the perspectivist point of view. Disorganizing a process to see…

The is the first filmed diary made by Yann Beauvais.

Through documentary images, old photographs and interviews, the director presents the Santa Tereza cable car, not only as an original means of transport and tourist element, but also as an important part of the history of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

A film by Arturas Barysas, one of Lithuania's "counter-culture" avant-garde pioneers.

A large area of England - Cumbria, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire - contained in a short film. Scenic splendour everywhere, from the Lakeland Fells to the Yorkshire Dales. Historic castles and mansions; sandy beaches. Ideal country for walking and exploring; a place to lift the spirit.

Focuses on French artist Edgar Degas and his visit to New Orleans in 1872.

Victoria Santa Cruz, dancer and choreographer, talks about the work she's developing with her folklore ensemble and shares her experience as a black peruvian woman in an interview with Eugenio Barba.

Fables have their relevance, particularly when dealing with such delicate topics as politics. This is the story of a retired gentleman with a distinctly British demeanor who buys nine provincial flowers to be planted in his garden. He avoids the fleur-de-lis, which, however, doesn't avoid him. Eventually their attitudes towards each other soften due to the beneficial effects of a watering can.

"... where beads of light searching out 'the beloved' do pulse with the beat of the filmmaker's heart in perfect contrapuntal rhythm with all else in the frame of that sequence." – Stan Brakhage, World Film Festival of Canada

Silent home movie shot by Diane and Karol Berolzheimer depicting Chicago's Maxwell street market in the autumn or winter of '78, currently held in collection at the Chicago Film Archives.

Two alien puppets go back in time and narrate nature videos.

Mexican feature film

A film by Renata Breth

When a man returns home to Bedford-Stuyvescent, NYC, he finds the young girls there dealing with growing problems of alcoholism, drug use, and teenage pregnancy. He decides to counteract the negative forces operating in the girls' lives by starting a track team for them which provides valuable discipline, gives them pride and confidence, and becomes a second family for many. The film follows the team through a city-wide competition held on Randall's island.

The juxtaposition of carefully selected classic television spots reveals how commercials exploit our hopes, fears, and fantasies.

Spying is equal parts diary film, structural film and conceptual film. The filmmaker “spies” on neighbors, passersby and day workers—whomever is visible from the vantage point of his camera as he gazes across the San Francisco cityscape. The film is a subjective portrait of the neighborhood: the routines of the inhabitants, their unconscious gestures of domesticity, an intimate look into the private moments of strangers as they are caught unawares by the voyeurism of Joe’s camera.

Experimental film on 16mm by Ioan Pleș as part of Kinema Ikon.

Differences between the live and the studio version of America's performance are interesting in and of themselves, although they are technical rather than content differences. The studio version is shot with a still camera in color, with no zooms or shifts in perspective. The live version – which took place in Tilburg on 3 November 1978 – is in black and white and somewhat shaky as a result of a human camera operator. There are also a number of zooms and shifts in perspective in the live version. The scenario, music, and duration of the piece remains the same. Very little action happens in this short piece, but arguably it is full of drama. The drama comes from the musical accompaniment. There is no other sound save for this music. It is overpowering, discordant classical that in a conventional film would often accompany a images of a crime unfolding or a character discovering something dramatic or traumatic.

A film by Toney W. Merritt

A film by Toney W. Merritt

A film by Toney W. Merritt

Anti-communism animated short film released after Argentina's last military coup in 1976.

In the intense, original Punk Rock scene at the Mabuhay Gardens (the only club in town which would allow it), the Avengers, Dils, Mutants, Sleepers, and UXA played a benefit for striking Kentucky coal miners (“Punks Against Oppression!”), raising $3300.

A series of exemplary visual elements unfold in many generations of images. The erotic scene which initiates this swirl maintains its persistent and non-consumable essence in the clash with nostalgia and fears, facts and dreams, memory’s debris. Ode to the invincible Eros.

She plays with the sand. Anonymous Dahomean music: percussion by two stones of four pieces of wood placed on the legs of the instrumentalist. This music is meant to keep monkeys and birds away from crops, but causes mutual attraction with the little girl.

A man and a woman prepare to go out. Later, they meet in a sophisticated bar.

This film is composed of 4 sections, corresponding to the four directions radiating out from a single house. They are as follows: 1 - daytime, facing east, with animation, desert from a window; 2 - daytime, facing south, with same animation, desert from a window; 3 - daytime, facing west, doghouse from a window; 4 - night, in front of a fireplace on the north wall; animation. The early pleasures are in the texture of the paper on the desert in the 1st two sections, side-lit (like a sea or dimpled skin), and the sun's first ray on the curled corner; the thrill of the comparison of places. Then maybe, the thrill that they actually exist in the same time and place, and are not contrived in an optical printer; then to learn that the fades in and out of the animation are by changes in the natural light. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

Dansité is the visualization, in cinematic space and time, of two bodies in motion; mobile, immobile, intertwined, broken, tense, restrained, suspended between heaven and earth, sand and rock, they suddenly stop, fixing the eternity of the moment.

Ellen on the Rope is an energetically expressive study of performer Ellen Fisher working out on the rope in her Lodge Hall rehearsal space, itself a handsome room of classical proportions and lighting. Sousa’s film studies Fisher’s strenuous activity from a series of vantage points, creating a strobing rhythm by crossing the camera’s shutter speed with the rate of the rope traversing its frame. Unlike other athletic film studies, usually focused on body properties or close-ups of muscular exertion, Ellen on the Rope directs our attention more towards physics, tracing the dynamics and energy of Ellen’s patterns through space with a camera that progresses from tripod stillness to sympathetic motion. A simple exercise, this film offers a fine example of two artists working out together on rope and celluloid.” B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader, 1979

A parody of feminist criticism on found footage covered by humoristic chisellings, signs or hasty figurative elements. Sometimes, chisellings are fine, and sometimes they are treated in large shots (razor tears, acid, cutting the film itself, wide spraying, thick stamps). A bedsheet is used as the final screen from which various women's evocations are represented.

It documents the installation of electrical lines high above a country valley.

A filmed diary that documents the period that Luyken stayed in the United States. The film consists of three parts: a half-hour filmed in New York, a half-hour report of hitchhiking from the east to the west coast, and again another half hour in New York. The images are edited in a quick sequence; in some cases, the shots are only one frame in length. The name White Line Fever refers to the monotonous succession of white markings on the motorway.

In Floorshow he presents a rich stream-of-consciousness flow of images that encompass past, present, and fantasy, a contemplation of the filmmaking process, and film aesthetics. Myers makes a bolder-than-ever attempt to break down the barriers between the conscious and subconscious, the making of a film and the film itself. What Myers projects is an acutely personal vision of life so beautifully shaped and paced that we're able to connect with it even if we cannot expect to decipher its private meanings.

This 1978 film by Fenwick Productions features a tour of Gardiner's Island by Robert David Lion Gardiner, the 16th Lord of the Manor. Its conversion from 16mm film was made possible by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.

With the help of his grandfather and a friend, a teenager learns to cope with his parents' divorce.

A film directed by Ion Grigorescu.

A film directed by Ion Grigorescu.

The shadow of an opening door sweeps across the floor...

A documentary short that speaks on the hierarchical organization and the contents of an Afro-Brazilian nagô temple.