Cinematic Era: 1979 Vintage

A patient, a nurse, a whip ... But where is the ghost?

a live promotional concert for "Lovedrive"

American Odyssey is a look at Orff-Schulwerk in America in 1979. Filmed in 17 schools in 7 states, it documents the creative process in music, movement, dance, theater, and the spoken word, involving students and teachers from kindergarten through community chorus and orchestra. Running throughout are the poem "Sky Dwellers" by Marcia Lunz and the poetic camerawork of Abbott Meader.

Eerie transformations of human and animal forms, rendered nearly abstract through image-keying, resonate with visual power in Heads. -EAI

"Images, voices, and attitudes of Black Residents of New Haven" (Monaco, How to Read A Film: Revised Edition, 1981)

Children of the fourth grade take you through a typical lunch period - from washing hands to putting garbage in the trash barrel.

Mexican feature film

Super 8 diary film by Robert Huot

A film by Joe Gibbons

Current Autobiography According to Bargain Basement Sinatra chronicles Natalka Voslakov's efforts to secure a boyfriend worthy enough to be the leading man in her film.

Two versions of this performance are documented in the collection of the Netherlands Media Art Institute. This particular version was filmed in the artist’s studio, ‘Performance (live)’ documents a live version. Very little action happens in this short piece, but arguably it is full of drama, coming from the musical accompaniment. There is no other sound save for this music. It is an overpowering, discordant classical piece that, in a conventional film, would often accompany an unfolding crime scene or a character discovering something dramatic or traumatic.

A film and installation a loop of clear film together with a loop of magnetic recording film the same length was laced in a double band projector, (a projector which can play/record a separate sound film, used for editing and post production) Various hand and mouth marks also to spraying ink using a primitive mouth diffuser used for fixing drawings etc, marks onto the film surface. The mark making was accompanied with a wide range of guttural noises in synchronization with the hand made marks being made and recorded onto the magnetic side of the projector. with the performance version the erase head was removed so as to accumulate the various sounds on the loop; The film makes a humorous contradiction to a current stylistic convention that the hand made mark would give an appropriate noise when passed through the optical sound reader on the projector.

A three colour separation study filmed at Pearl Beach, which examines the same scene of Amethyst Avenue during the progression of a winter, then a summer day. With the sea in the background, the moving objects such as the pedestrians, cyclists, traffic are transparent and ephemeral while the stationary objects are opaque and retain a permanent quality. A strange, almost surreal quality illustrating the transitional nature of life.

A haunting Santerían morsel of mysticism, ritual, and artist-as-subject from the towering Cuban-American.

The focus of attention in one of the earliest films by a highly prolific documentary director Edmundas Zubavicius is a veterinary clinic in Kaunas; the observation of its daily routine reveals the longing for human sympathy as if yearning for a prayer. Quite a sophisticated relation between the visual and the sound is outweighed by the junctions of poetic film language and realistic shots. They invite to contemplate the relationship between nature and man.

Whale Songs, the ambitious final film in the period of Beams’s personal 16mm filmmaking, combines whale watching with depictions of the animation process itself. The film was hand-colored in negative color, then filmed on color-reversal stock and printed as a negative, contributing to the film’s singular look.

Narcisso Metal is a film for Narcissus, mirrors and windows where the look is the subject since it’s Narcissus’ toy. This isn’t without danger as we know. Truly speaking a self-portrait film: in most of the scenes, the director is filming himself through an automatic release mechanism or at a distance.

Documentary by Hans-Dieter Grabe.

A conversation between Rolando Peña and Iván Loscher during the construction of the Caracas subway. "La Cotorra No. 2" is a very personal, humorous rehearsal of the current communications of our societies as well as ours.

Regarded as a creative extension of Stone (1975), animation unfolds on drawing paper placed on a field and farm.

La Grande Famille by René Magritte in different sizes superimposed, animates the dove and gives an impression of continuous flight.

In 1954, the "Automat Imbiss" opened on Alexanderplatz. With its compartments from which meals could be taken in exchange for coins, it corresponded to the ideas of modernity and the future at that time. Twenty years later, when Thomas Heise shot his film, the snack bar had long since lost its showcase character. With a sober eye, he documents its everyday routines.

A poetic display of water in the town.

Kuntzel describes this work: "Three people, or rather three silhouettes of rare objects — frames, windows perhaps, a[n] illustrated manuscript — and a few minimal actions: pages being leafed through, someone sitting down, someone lying down, getting up, crossing a space, lighting a cigarette, a head turning, a mouth opening, someone looking around. There is hardly any representation in Nostos I: just enough to tip-toe around the edges of analogy, illusion, under the image and in between images." Unfolding as memory traces and dream images, figures and objects appear and disappear, decompose and recompose; disjointed fragments evolve in continuous transformation and manipulations of light and time.

The notion of a line which divides the land from the sea is a notion of convenience which is only valid in certain circumstances. If there is a line at all, it only exists for a second or so, and is never repeated again. This film was shot on this imaginary line, but the leading or trailing edge of the wave is never represented. The shore line is replaced by a frame line which divides each one-second "take" from its neighbour. The frame is either filled with water or littered with stones and sand exposed after the wave has receded. The image on the screen, the organic rhythm of the waves, is not destroyed by the violence of the structures imposed upon it. Nature emerges uninhibited, revealing yet further complexities of shape and form. The illusory shore line remains invisible, trapped on celluloid, hidden by the mechanics of the projector, and de-materialised by the illusion of cinematographic movement.

The subject of the first essay is cinema itself: an apparatus of representation wherein fact and fiction are recreated. As such, the pro-filmic facts are necessarily drawn from two of cinema's "pioneers": Louis and Auguste Lumière and Abel Gance (La Roue), with additional material provided from a Warner Brothers featurette, Spills for Thrills.

A 16-year-old schoolgirl writes in her diary about her dreams and longings, especially about her relationship with a man. She uses this feeling, more unconsciously, as an opportunity to daydream and escape from very concrete problems such as job hunting and role conflicts. The film fully engages with the feelings and thoughts of its main protagonist and reproduces her dreams of an ideal world with correspondingly kitschy images.

German film.

Program of biographical character, about Camilo Castelo Branco. Poetically, it recreates the passage of the melancholy presence of the writer, lonely by the land, while an old storyteller shares the biography of the renowned author for simple people of a humble settlement.

A documentary about Swedish teen culture in the 1970s, following Micke Åström, 14, and his friends.

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space.

Rueben is a used book store owner who believes he can communicate with the items he sells. Through these discussions, he learns the ways to keep books from being destroyed by careless and malicious children. Part of the Coronet "Beginning Responsibilities" series.

In Susan Stein’s early film, G, her interest is language and work and how the two are connected. Experimenting with the conjunction of images and sound, she shows a typewriter from a variety of angles, punctuating the images with the almost abstracted sounds of a clock, typing and a monologue. The result is a reflection on both the material and artistic processes confronting an author. “Thinking about writing and hearing and writing of the film, the same alphabet which has been shared by many women.” (SS)

“It came from 1979! A paranoid tale of the myths and misconceptions surrounding body changes in adolescence. Found footage with hand drawn flourishes. In full 16mm punk-era unrestored decrepitude! Made in one week. Sound by Ground Zero, Boston.” —Lisa Crafts

The struggles of the workers at Montedison in Porto Marghera, following an accident that resulted in the deaths of three people.

Wings white, she's red, wings scream, she sings, wings fly, she moans, wings rise, she hides, wings move, she teaches me. Leila, night name, exhumates my childhood memories and introduces me to the marvelous.

Tracklist: 01. Rock And Roll Band 02. Shattered Images 03. Peace Of Mind 04. Feelin 'Satisfied 05. Don't Look Back 06. More Than A Feeling 07. A Man I'll Never Be 08. Smokin ' 09. Organ Solo / Smokin ' 10. Solo 11. This Time 12. Foreplay / Longtime 13. Something About You 14. Party

Lotte Reiniger's last film, following the adventures of two kingdoms through the overseeing eye of a destiny-knitting witch.

Short documentary by Ebrahim Mokhtari

45 fingers were needed to play the film soundtrack mimicking the sun's movement over four months on piano keys.

A film in three acts, each act prefaced by a short circus act. Act 1 – Cutting liver, Act II – Ironing, Act III – Plucking Eyebrows. Three potentially violent domestic activities performed by a woman. Jayne Parker discovered film as a medium when she was a sculpture student at Canterbury College of Art (1977-80). In early works, objects, performance and gesture were combined by the camera to explore space, duration and the physical body. The images in these early films were both literal and metaphoric, depicting exact events but also creating physical and personal associations for the viewer. Ideas are evoked in images rather than words; ordinary actions are also enigmas.

Australian-Canadian documentarian Rubbo, along with Quebecois journalist Louis-Bernard Robitaille, travels to Paris to take the temperature of European Communism in general and in particular the French Left, still reeling from May ’68 and the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. A unique, impassioned collection of often-contentious testimonials, including personal recollections of Soviet repression and a stinging indictment of careerist radicalism among the New Philosophers.

This is a shortened version of a three-movement film made over a summer’s stay in Provincetown, MA (Cape Cod), first alone, then with family. A journal of sorts, it renders the place with obvious affection. The town remains today, to an amazing degree, as it appears in this film from decades ago.

“One of my best, an early study about life, love, sex & death. This film has explicit images and may be problematic for children and some adults. Shot at ‘Mother’s’ club and the Gross Anatomy Lab in Detroit, various locations in Provincetown and from a motel somewhere in between.” (J.B.)

The young man helps the old woman he meets get home. It turns out to be Death. She teaches him the secrets of healing, but makes him promise to abide by the agreement - if he sees her at the feet of a patient, he can treat him, but if she stands at his head, this person is hers. But circumstances are such that the doctor violates the agreement.

1979 German super 8 short work

Feyers is Dirk de Bruyn's most complicated work employing the many techniques he has experimented with over the years. Appropriately subtitled 'a dance', this film's interweaving of various experimentations lends itself to a stunning, rhythmic effect.