Cinematic Era: 1980 Vintage

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

Notes from a trip to the countryside landscape of central Chile (Maule). Dawn, men by a campfire, a boy prepares a basket to catch animals, a man with vine shoots on his back, men hunting rabbits, a man lying in bed with a Virgin by his side talks about his children who have departed, castration of a animal while the peasants cast carvings, songs and a procession of a Virgin with candles. A woman talks about Saint Sebastian who has cured her son. Horse race. Party at sunset with voices, Mexican music and boleros. Group of men in front of a campfire. (Info: Itinerary of Chilean Documentary Cinema 1900-1990, Alicia Vega)t

Film about a women's shelter in Oslo

16mm experimental short film.

16mm experimental short film starring Toney Merritt.

Fencer is a documentary portrait of Władyslaw Kurpiewski, an eminent fencing coach and co-creator of numerous successes of Polish foilists. Combining poetic impression and documentary curiosity, Dziworski draws up a kind of an artistic credo for himself.

Floor of Vanishing was a work Matsuzawa Yutaka presented in a cobblestoned square in Middelburg, the Netherlands square in August 1980, and this video documents the Human Extinction ceremony Matsuzawa performed along with the unfurling of a banner. In this film, Matsuzawa appears highly energetic as he unfolds the pink Banner of Extinction and inscribes on it with a brush: “Humans, Let’s Vanish, Let’s Go, Let’s Go.” The film was shot by Matsuzawa’s eldest daughter Kumiko, who accompanied him on many overseas trips.

1980: the repression is in full swing in Haiti. A decree is going to ban all independent speaking and all manifestation of thought. Artists, writers, journalists, democrats all pay the price. A radio station, Haiti Inter, and its journalists are at the center of the storm. This film reconstructs a typical broadcast of Haiti Inter in the 1980s.

ca. 1980-81, 4 min, Super-8mm. "In Blue Aura, a man and woman are asleep in bed. The dream begins with a crudely made, whirling paper spiral and the woman is twirled out of bed to her strange mission. The man remains in his own unconscious ritual, looking like a Byzantine saint in face and form. The sheets rise to either side of him in stylized drapes and fall across his body in curving pleats. The dream continues and the man joins the woman, but as if in a separate dream of his own. The film ends but the dream does not seem to; the man and woman are trapped in this half-life and dream on." — Barbara Sharres, "Trance Occurrences," Chicago Reader, January 15 1982.

All Of One Company is a 1980 documentary showing daily life aboard the ill fated HMS Coventry—including daily chores, mock drills, and resupplying at sea—during its ten-day voyage from Portsmouth to Hong Kong via Singapore. In Portsmouth, members of the Coventry’s crew carry supplies off the ship. The gangplank is pushed back and the Royal Navy destroyer leaves the dock.

Through the unique story of a trans woman, this documentary shows what the experience of trans-identity could have been like in the 1970s.

Biographical television film about Małgorzata Fornalska, a Polish communist activist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The people in the village are being ridiculous. The woman pulls water out of the well, but the handle hits her several times. While the barber is sharpening his razor, the client's beard reaches his waist. The farmer stepped on the hoe and it hit him. A blacksmith can't strike iron while it's hot. The dog does not chase the wolf, but bites its owner. A mouse eats a cat. In the finale, it turns out that the only thing the villagers can do normally is to play a folk dance. In their hands, the dancers hold sickles and hammers.

A biker discovered a strange machine in a box abandoned on the side of the road. After that, he had a shockingly unforgettable night.

This documentary presents video footages from President Samora Machel's discourses and from his interactions with Mozambican people; includes narration in Portuguese that discuss Mozambique social conditions and developments after independence from Portuguese colonial administration was obtained.

A look at society's response to ageing, particularly with regard to older women.

A lateral tracking shot is repeated. By reversing the reel during the shooting of the second strip of double 8mm film, movement is identical to the first shot and the two opposite tracking shots are combined on the screen, which gives the film the appearance of a cylindrical unwinding. Blown up to 16mm.

Using the steel of a woman's face and eyes as a basic motif, the surprising world created by the free relationship between one frame and the next is amplified by the violent collision of unintelligible female voices, etc., and directly affects our perception. The film is not theatrical, literary, or pictorial, but aims to be cinematic, and is never tied up in real-time and space, and for this reason, it has an interest not found in tested and unerring films, and not found in traditionally accepted and conventional films.

Kids work to restore an old School bus

A chance meeting of a young girl causes a lot of trouble for the calm engineer.

My high school life is the worst, but I wanted to express that feeling while I'm the worst," says the director, and his feelings are conveyed through direct images. In his room, the protagonist looks at an album while wearing an eye patch for some reason. The sound of sniffling throughout the film. A classroom scene is repeated like a formula. In contrast to the quiet flow of the first half of the film, the second half is filled with the power of visual sadism and a throbbing urge for violence, such as the constant beating of a boy on a motorbike.

Dressed as priests Johannes die Doper (Regardt van den Bergh), and his partner George (Bill Flynn) attempt to rob a rich lady. With the help of other thieves they experience tense misunderstandings with a lot of action when a secret government document lands in their hands

This interview with a Mexican squatter in Oaxaca, Mexico is an example of the genre that Breder conceptualized as “aesthetic ethnography.” This term refers to processes and form which attempt to illuminate people and cultures in specific historical moments and places through an aesthetic rather than a scientific methodology.

Four short films featuring rare footage of Brixton during the 1960s to 1980s by Clovis Salmon, aka ‘Sam The Wheels’. A self-taught filmmaker, Salmon began filming his neighbourhood in Brixton in 1959. His unique archive of Super 8 celluloid films includes church and community events, activism, local struggles and the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Riots. Clovis Salmon was born in Jamaica in 1930, and was among the first generation of migrants from the West Indies to settle in the United Kingdom, arriving in London in November 1954. Having run his own bike shop in Jamaica, he joined Holdsworth Cycle Co. as a bicycle repair man, and soon became known as ‘Sam the Wheels’.

Film by Michael Rudnick

Two women – childhood friends from Lebanon – meet accidentally in a Paris cafe. Eva, a Jew, and Samia, a Muslim, try to reconstruct their friendship from ten years ago only to find that history and politics constantly interfere with their relationship.

Documents the archaeological dig for the lost 1618 settlement of Wolstenholme on the James River in Virginia.

A plea against the degradation of nature by humans.

Filmed over a period of several years "for a variety of motives and no objective" from a window above a shop in Victoria St., North Melbourne where the filmmaker was living. When he edited the footage several years later the filmmaker re-found "the overwhelming nature of all phenomena" which he had felt as he sat at the window. - NFSA

Bressan's first truly fictional foray, created after he defended a thesis in literature on Alexandre Dumas. (CJC)

Either the meter: unit of measure. Either the frame: space time unit within the film strip. Either 24fps: speed unit of the apparatus. Either the screen: canvas without retina, the meter at it’s square. Either the projection: the meter taken to its cube. The sum total of these units produces its meaning. Abstract value or short essay on communication, the meter dictates, tires us by its arrogance, its relentlessness. The tacit agreement is what is at stake in this film whose screening at the limit is superfluous. In this sense it also questions the measure of the maitre.

A wacky musical comedy parody of George A. Romero's zombie films.

The focus is on the bus driver and his need for continuous and absolute concentration. There is emphasis on the potential disaster that is always lurking and that an atmosphere conducive to driver concentration is essential. The result of what happens when a distraction occurs is shown.

I took along a beach ball on my trip to California; it is bounced, rolled, tossed, kicked and carried by a motley collection of complete strangers who express a great range of attitudes towards the camera, the ball and me. This film incorporates an unusual improvised soundtrack for solo bassoon.

Influenced by Italian neorealism and by the social environment of the heroes: ruins, landscapes, Khrushchev-apartment houses rising on the outskirts of the Vilnius.

"The former is one that reminded me of Méliès, with its simple but profoundly affecting special effects, such as a shadow puppet-like model of a ship being carried against well-lit backgrounds; Bruns renders the artlessness artful, and his modest ambitions exude the purity of early cinema. " - Karen Sachs

Three sailors land in the Santos port after four months at sea and head to São Paulo. (1) "A Carta de Érico" ("The Letter from Érico") The first sailor brings a letter from a man named Érico that he had stumbled upon in an alley in Porto Alegre. He arrives at the address in São Paulo and knocks on the door but nobody answers. Meanwhile in the apartment, the depressed Ms. Cibele Marcondes is ready to commit suicide. When she opens the envelope, there is only a blank piece of paper.

(1980) A Joint Development Educational Film. "Single" was created for use by churches and community groups to help people realized what it is like when a single person tries to enter a group composed primarily of couples. It shows how groups may, even unwittingly, drive single people away.

Elton and his band perform live in New York's Central Park, September 1980.

Recalling the flickering invention of early silent film illusionists, this battle of wits begins simply enough, with the innocent creation of cut-and-fold triangles from a blank sheet of paper.

Experimental film from visual artist Cioni Carpi, shot in 16mm in b/w. One Way Walk concerns “the global effort of man … to exercise a condition, the meaning of which escapes him completely.”

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

In Time Smoking a Picture, simple gestures and images — a figure smoking a cigarette, a frame within a frame — unfold in time as elusive manifestations of reality and representation, transformed by barely perceptible variations of shifting color and passages of light. Raymond Bellour has written of Kuntzel's achievement in "representing the unrepresentable: the spatial or temporal in-between created by the disjunction/conjunction between mental representation and perception, surface and depth... past and present, conscious and unconscious. As the hero — the author and original spectator — establishes his presence, crossing the room in both frames at once, we are given the outline of what representation holds out to fiction: the hero's gaze into the window, where he can see his life slipping past, inside and outside."