Cinematic Era: 1980 Vintage

Experimental Super-8 film by Carlos Castillo.

The Segalls’ interest in children’s lives dated from the mid-1960s, when, using a camera placed off-stage, they filmed the end of the year festivities at their daughter’s nursery. The result was Big Little Feelings, which won the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival in 1964. In the years that followed, the idea of including their own child in some of their films did not sit well with the political bureaucrats. In the end, she would only feature briefly in two short sequences at the end of this and another documentary, filmed eleven years later with the same children (The Feelings Have Grown, 1975). In both films, Doru Segall proudly makes clear that he is both the film’s cinematographer and the father of the girl in the image—a personal, autobiographic detail unusual for a Sahia film. Over the following years, the Segalls continued to work on documentaries about children, including Exams (1976), The High Schoolers (1978), Parents Meeting (1980), and The School Leavers (1986).

Offers a disconcerting glimpse behind the scenes of the ballet school at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In her graduation film, Marijke Jongbloed did not present a romantic impression, but a world full of venom, grimness and brutal rivalry.

An intensive interview with the young protagonist Rainer about his non-conformist life is combined with scenes from his everyday life. The documentary fiction Orangemond by Gabriele Denecke was created in 1979/80 as part of her master's student studies with Frank Beyer at what was then the GDR University of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg. The film was not completed. After viewing the raw material, the university decided that there would be no editing for the film. Eventually Gabriele Denecke was only able to put the film together in the sequence of scenes.

Passing away, an old lighthouse keeper recollects the key events of her life, with the past and the present converging at her deathbed.

A Super 8 film with sound by Joseph Morder.

A silent, Super 8 film by Joseph Morder.

A film by Yves Rollin

The young drummer of the pioneer band is expelled because of his short height. His trek through the fields led to the City of Golden Cockerels, where drummer children used to live under the guidance of an obviously infantile king. But the king died, the prince was too young, and an evil minister with evil minions took power.

UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Flipping the post-modern stream of broadcast on its head, “False Profit” weaves an inverted vision of American television and the centricity of consumerism, religion, and war.

UCLA Animation Workshop Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Experimental computer animation in which a poem emerges overlayed on abstracted patterns.

UCLA Animation Workshop Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Paper-cut animation using images from medieval paintings of a group of blind people who walk into a tar pit and then walk into the jury room of the International Festival of Animation.

Robert Richter exposed the fact that U.S. medicines were being exported to developing nations with minimal, misleading, or non-existent information about side effects and other warnings. Only one manufacturer agreed to be interviewed for this hard-hitting report and then tried to bribe Richter to cancel the broadcast.

Tour along the Amazon River¸ from its source to the mouth¸ observing the people on the banks and the areas they inhabit as well as the landscape.

UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Experimental video piece using a video tape recorder (VTR) to play with color inversion, animation, and psychedelic patterning techniques overlayed with a live video feed.

Throughout the trip to present the action film Le Sexe du loup-garou in Lyon, in 1980, Jakobois and his assistant undertake a travel diary. The Super 8 camera, a very common type (it does not allow focusing) passes alternately from one person's hands to the other's. There is even a sequence filmed by a passing observer (Catherine Haubois). Different filming styles were used within the limits of the small camera's possibilities. The trip continues with a family visit of which some reminiscences were captured. The return was through Vichy.

A professor arrives in Montreal to give a lecture about his country. One by one, he justifies the accusations of human rights violations in Chile in a speech that gradually loses its coherence.

Conversation with the poet out on the island of Runmarö.

Christy Rupp’s video City Wildlife: Mice, Rats, Roaches is a playful essay on our most common nonhuman animal friends. Produced by Chris Post and Peter Von Zeigesar, the film advocates a more ecology-centric vision of city-dwelling animals, seeing them as intrinsic to the function of the natural world of New York.

The 15th "Paul Hornick" Tank Regiment Cottbus, a unit of the "Heinrich Rau" Air Wing in Trollenhagen and the People's Navy are presented. In addition to the introduction of the units and a biographical outline of the namesakes, the garrison towns of Rostock, Cottbus and Neubrandenburg are also presented - urban and economic development in the region as well as cultural life.

Zora has no complaints about her husband, except that he gave her 20 children in 20 years! Kheira, who was married at 13, recounts her story through tears: the young grandmother remembers the years she spent fighting to get back the son her first husband took away from her. These touching portraits of Algerian women were filmed in Marseille.

Documentary about the participation of women in the Nicaraguan Revolution.

British Transport Film.

In the first half, the film shows classroom situations in which pupils with learning difficulties encounter derogatory behavior from the rest of their classmates. The teacher, however, remains indifferent. In the second half, the teacher tries to address these school problems in a discussion with the class and to motivate the children to deal with the learning difficulties of their classmates so that mutual help becomes possible.

A look at the typical American family of the nuclear age.

Two Keith Harings—one on a TV screen, the other sitting in front of the TV—recite a number of words.

Magic Explained (1980) plays with a set of traditional symbols that appear frequently in Barrie’s work—and that are familiar from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon—in a manner analogous to Méliés’s play with people and objects; the imagery is exquisitely hand-scratched and hand-painted.

Short film by Brazilian photographer and filmmaker Eduardo Clark.

According to the liner notes and all contemporary databases with proven reliability, this is the only extant video footage of Jim Shepard's jaw-dropping band Vertical Slit in any form. Running around 30 minutes or so, filmmaker David Kerr's footage is very much a DIY affair, steeped in gloriously primitive, narrative experimentalism. The single free-form jam explodes visually into a psychedelic miasma, and there are dystopian cameos from all your favorite monsters.

Shortfilm by Max Müller

Documentary directed by Hans S. Lampe

The film records incidents from the everyday life of a shepherd near Cologne during one year.

This short film deals with questions of liability for defects, the dealer's warranty and the buyer's rights.

Appearance is of great importance to the Bororo, to the Wadaabe in particular. After the rainy season, the Wadaabe hold a gerewole at the home of a rich herdsman. This is a contest of beauty, dancing and elegance for the young men, who dance for four days and nights on end.

Zeitspiele is a playful satire about optimal time management in a company with countless side blows to the socialist planned economy.

he white wings of a dove seem to come out of the darkness of the infinite night of the soul. As if looking for an escape route, the dove plows through the space of a house, flies grazing over a house of cards, flies over a baroque table set ... The television screen, teeming with pixels, swallows the eye projecting it into an unknown deep space of nature technological. Visions of medieval and contemporary battles, baroque allegories, Bosch and Dulle Griet and hedonistic paradises alternate with dazzling images: a sicilian performance by the Living Theater, faces that splash from the screen, overlap, suddenly emerge from the unconscious. Each moment of vision contains Time, which pulsates on the screen, compressed and flashing, at the speed of 24 frames per second.

The famous sunken city should reappear, but we must wait for the day when all warfare will have ceased for a hundred years.

Fragments of an interior space has been realized in 1980 with P.P. Fassetta. Images roused by the meeting between reality and imagination and gathered in the mental space of the story, change as perceptions and states of mind change. The poetry of the bodily expression and the matter which is free to act in the vacuum, blend in the mutual feeling of nature.

On the stage of a deserted movie theater, a man in a black robe appears and performs a series of yo-yo tricks. In this surreal work of celluloid animation, Yo Yo the Clone, Too shows the yo-yo coming to life and spawning a number of organic forms — including a clone of the yo-yoist himself. Set to sounds reminiscent of 1970s video games, the film is a hypnagogic unfolding of shapes and sounds with a touch of Somersaulter-Moats and Somersaulter's signature Kafkaesque uncanniness.

An eerie portrait of male strength and weakness.

An autobiographical collage that questions self-identity.

A documentary on the inhabitants and unique natural environment of the Western Isles of Breidarfjördur bay, Iceland. Photographed in 1975-1980, the film mirrors in a one-year cycle the age-old ties between man and nature. The film asks why these islands, where there was once a flourishing community, are now practically deserted, a little known utopia where time stands still.

The "brother film" of Legokaupunki, made by Jary and Jiri Kuukkanen´and a few friends between 1977-1980, published by Heimo Kuukkanen. This animation, created not long after the introduction of the LEGO minifigure in 1978, feature the earliest known use of a minifig walk cycle.

Far less withholding is Werden’s most astonishing tape, “I Bet You Ain’t Seen Noth’n Like This Before,” one of a series of conversations conducted with sex workers and fetishists. In the video, Werden speaks with an older man who sits naked at home. The man explains that he has the ability to penetrate himself with his own penis, and then performs the act for the unblinking camera, ultimately reaching climax by rubbing up against a set of audio speakers emitting pulses of shortwave radio noise. “The tape is devastating,” Greyson wrote. “Its impact lies in the implicit collaboration between the subject and the producer—indeed, the subject controls everything that occurs. There is no possibility of exploitation, for Werden has refused to comment, moralize, or otherwise frame the experience of this very articulate gentleman: what you see is what you get, and I bet you ain't seen nothing like this before…”

THE CEREMONY is a fantasy with all its attending elements of two-dimensional characters moving in pre-ordained patterns: a pretty bride venturing past her insecunties in order to engage herself in human communication; a detached groom who has lost touch with the origin of his need to ceremonially "play it cool," an obese priest whose gluttony and vomiting mirror his impotence both to give or receive; and an assortment of sometimes bizarre guests who, out of their needs and insecurities, carry out a ceremony all their own, touching here and there on the private ceremonies of the Bride, the Groom and the Prelate. Ceremonies are a way, sometimes agreed upon and sometimes not, of dealing with life situations. They seldom are a way of resolving those situations. Fantasies are our fears and wishes arguing with and sometimes defeating aspects of reality; they may afford insights but never a reality-based solution. -Hugh Thompson

Chinese opera film from 1980.

8mm film by Swiss artist Roman Signer.

8mm film by Swiss artist Roman Signer.

A Short film about a cow that doesn't want to eat grass.

Short film.

a John Cage inspired (his work for prepared piano accompanies the visuals) backyard yin/yang, optically printed meditation.