Cinematic Era: 1980 Vintage

Conversation with the poet out on the island of Runmarö.

A 1980 Documentary on Durga Puja by National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).

A day in the life of the Frankenstein Monster, from his point of view.

Short film about the earthquake in Montenegrin littoral.

Black and white pen and paper animated short film, comprising of a psychedelic vision of people undergoing metamorphosis.

Commissioned for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York, Olympic Fragments is a taut, expressive reinterpretation of athletic movement, a tour-de-force of dynamic editing and post-production techniques. Through sophisticated visual and aural juxtapositions, Fitzgerald and Sanborn isolate the gestures and movements of athletes in a controlled, powerful display. Eschewing the "thrill of victory" tradition of broadcast television sports coverage, they allow a portrait of individual skill and grace under pressure to emerge from their manipulation of highly fragmented and choreographed imagery — what they term the "skill, beauty and sheer joy of kineticism.

Manifesto for a third world cinema, in response to the boycott of Brazilian cinema and the closure of theaters.

Short educational film by Vladimir Kobrin.

The title of Vegetable Memory derives from the writings of Jalaludin Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet. Evolving as what Viola terms a "kind of temporal magnifying glass," the work explores the perceptual phenomenon of repetitive, cyclic viewing. A loop of images recorded at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo is extended in progressively slower cycles, changing the form, feeling and ultimately the meaning of the original images as they move further into the subjective and pictorial.

Alcoholism is the subject of this animated film. Stark line drawings portray the vicious cycle of drinking and family break-up, as the head of a family drinks to forget the drudgery of his life. The consequences are disastrous. A film without words in which images speak volumes.

Two Hobos were once each extraordinary men until life’s tribulations tragically tripped them both up. Dumasani used to be a renowned professional boxer, but after losing an important match, he fell into a downward spiral of depression and alcohol abuse, until ultimately landing up on the streets. Similarly, Jabulani used to be a great detective with numerous successful cases to his name, but after losing his wife and family through a nasty divorce, he too found solace at the bottom of a bottle and woke up one day to find himself homeless on the streets.

A visual and musical elaboration on the Crab Canon in which the theme of intersecting beams is played against itself going backwards.

Based on a novel by Akagi Motoko; a physiological literary world written by a 20-year-old woman for a radio drama. While a girl misses the last train and spends the night in a phone booth, the words she speaks into the empty receiver impress us with her pregnant tenderness rather than the sadness of her separation from him. Gradually, as we see the gaps in her life, the death of her twin sister when she was a child, her desire to be independent from her mother, and the fact that she really misses him, the movement of images becomes the movement of emotions. The phone booth that is supposed to protect her from the rain looks like a womb, but it is actually cold. When she realizes this, the morning arrives.

The second drawing animation I made when I was a student at Musashino Art University.

Like the strings in the Byzantine Variations by Romanian composer Paul Constantinescu that accompany this audiovisual sonata, the images of a landscape passing outside the window of a moving train, a road, a house, and a hand shaping the imaginary landscape of childhood in a pile of sand strewn on a tabletop, adhere to and permeate each other.

The Watts Summer Festival is one of the oldest African American cultural festivals in the United States. The Watts community founded the event in 1966, one year after the Watts uprising. Ulysses Jenkins's film captures moments from the festival, including footage from a performance by the band War. This California funk band—famous for songs such as "Low Rider," "The Cisco Kid," and "Why Can't We Be Friends?"—was also well known for its multiethnic membership. The 1972 Watts Festival was one of the first events that Jenkins filmed, and he captured the underlying issues of community and commemoration that defined the annual event. At the time the local news media would, in Jenkins's opinion, misrepresent the festival by issuing warnings about it, and the artist's own footage served to counteract the media's negative view.

While looking for his cat, a young boy meets and befriends his neighbor, who is a biology professor.

Short work.

Based on a poem from the Icelandic sagas, this film tells of how Thrymur, the king of trolls, stole the hammer of Thor and how Thor got it back.

Third in a series, this film is divided into four sections: The Tortuous Nature of our Progress, The Fire-El Fuego, Distance Number of Nothing, White Rushes Tied to a Cluster of Mulberry Shoots.

Small rips and tears progress with stunning rhythm to the ultimate split of our world. The imagery has a delicate sketchy quality that resonates against a subtle soundtrack to create an overwhelming mood between laughter and tears.

Documentary about an Englishman who served as a hangman in Fiji Island.

video U-Matic, colour, sound, 12' (destroyed)

Directors belonging to the PLO film organisations were barred from entering territories under Israeli administration. Kais Al-Zubaidi sent a West-German film team into the territories occupied in 1967. They talked to Palestinian peasants and refugees and to Israeli settlers. The former have lost their fields and meadows and are to be driven further East from the camps in which they lived since 1948. The latter call their new settlement area “liberated land”.

Animated short about a cat and a dog and a car.

The film follows the stories of men and women who work with steel drums in various capacities, including a steel drum tuner, university and primary school students performing on steel drums, as well as two steel drum orchestras.

Mexican feature film

This documentary shows the social organization in Tuzamapan de Galeana, Puebla, an indigenous community, mostly Totonaca. Describes some economic activities that include: planting beans, sugar cane, corn, coffee, and the work of ranchers and bakers, among others. It is also emphasized how these works are taught from generation to generation.

Short film by Hollis Frampton

Parents who lost track of their children speak about their attempts to find them and hope for reunion.

Flowers in compression and expansion, blurry and clear, ballet of flowers around which we turn, flowers in final bouquet. A choreography of these fascinating messengers of love.

A young man watches the bikinis and boogie boarders around him but just can't relate.

Groundbreaking in its own way, Bionda fragola is inspired by The Boys in The Band, La cage aux folles (shot two years earlier), with a touch of Neil Simon. Based on a stage drama (1978), it is the first comedy film to focus on a light, "normalized" homosexual lifestyle. It is an important and courageous (for the period in which it was shot) example of Italian-style camp, which tells the story of a stable gay couple. Accountant Antonio (Umberto Orsini) and pharmacist Domenico (Mino Bellei) live together as if they were married, but their relationship becomes shaky when model Adriano comes on the scene. Bionda fragola was written, directed and interpreted by theatre director and actor Mino Bellei. The title recalls the much referenced, homonymous movie of 1941directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Rita Hayworth (The Strawberry Blonde).

The Cologne Edelweiss Pirates were one of those proletarian resistance groups against the Nazi regime that are easily forgotten to this day. They were adolescent urban Indians who threw sand in the gears, who sang forbidden songs like: ...what can Hitler's life give us, we want to be Bundish, we want to be free of Hitler. At night, they added Nazi slogans such as "Wheels roll for victory" with "Nazi heads roll after the war! They derailed a supply train for the front and stole food for Russian foreign workers. On November 10, 1944, thirteen of them were publicly hanged in Hüttenstraße in Cologne-Ehrenfeld without a court verdict. The youngest was 16 years old. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the Edelweiss Pirates were not recognized as resistance fighters for decades, but defamed as criminals. The film was the contribution of all those involved in the film to the rehabilitation of the thirteen murdered people from Hüttenstraße.

A meat-eating monarch marries a vegetarian princess.

Experimental Filmmaker Scott Bartlett speaks of his filmmaking techniques and aesthetics at the time of OffOn's release. The film includes scenes from an experimental video class in which students incorporate Bartlett's footage from his film OffOn into a new live video mix.

A South Vietnamese refugee family learns to live in the USA

A story about cooperation.

Early film by Jayne Parker.

A 1980 video art piece by American artist Morgan Fisher, a multi-projection work featuring floating spheres of different colors (green, red, blue) projected simultaneously.

In this film, the image produces the sound, the "image sound". The filmmaker takes pictures of landscapes, incidents. The various images are used to cover a wide range of sounds. The main melody is the radiographic image of a comb.

Part of BFI collection "Worth the Risk?"

Explaining new developments in civil engineering survey work, and the latest methods of preparing accurate and highly detailed drawings. The film basically tells the story of the Selby Diversion and how the then modern Durham County Council's "Moss" computer aided drawing system was used. Made for BR Eastern Region and Transmark for showing to engineering and general audiences in the UK, and to potential users of the BR system in other countries.

Directed by Mohammad Tehrani.

Estuary was made during the three weeks between December 17th 1979 and January 6th 1980. The film was shot from a small cabin boat moored near the mouth of the Keyhaven river. This is a place known to me since my childhood and the location for several paintings, films and photographic pieces. The camera was fixed relative to the motion of the boat as it responded to the action of wind and tide. This resulted in an intermittent scanning of 360 degrees about the central axis provided by the mooring, and a periodic vertical motion of about eight feet due to the rise and fall of the tide. A four second section of the film was exposed every fifteen minutes between dawn and dusk.

A short trip into daydream-like surrealism.