Cinematic Era: 1981 Vintage

The Stranglers in concert at the Royal Theatre, Nottingham and broadcast via the ITV network

At the Nureyev Festival at the London Coliseum in July 1983, Rudolf Nureyev danced the faun as part of a Homage to Diaghilev in a mixed bill of ballets. Then, in the late 1980s, dance notation specialists Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke reconstructed the ballet from Nijinsky's own notebooks, his dance notation, and the photographs of the dancers that Baron Adolph de Meyer produced shortly after the original performance of the ballet. This reconstructed version is often presented alongside Nijinsky's other works or repertoire from the Ballets Russes.

Film about the director's run-in with the law.

“Film images are projected when light is emitted from the projector lens and reaches the screen. The projector and the screen are connected by a beam of light. If you block this beam with a white board, images are projected onto it, and these images are a cross-section of the beam of light. The beam is like a Kintaro candy: you can intersect it at any point and the same images will appear. I wanted to make a film that was like staring at this cross-section of the beam of light - like staring at an image that, after being emitted from the projector, is in the process of floating toward the screen.” (Isao Kota)

Pink film distributed by Tokatsu.

The film focuses on the statues, patterns of stone in the city of Saratov.

A film set to the songs of Bruce Springsteen. Conceived and choreographed by Marta Renzi in 1981 for the WGBCH New Television Workshop.

Here is a list of the videos and performances on Volume 8: 01 Toxic Reasons-Destroyer, Vote Two Little Skeletons 02 Z'ev-Art 03 Minimal Man-Imagination 04 Mutants-Perfect, War Against Girls (Live) 05 Mau Maus-We All Fall Down, Trap, War Babies (Live) 06 Before (Live) 07 MDC (Millions of Dead Cops)-Speed, Selfish Shit, John Wayne Was a Nazi (Live) 08 Circle Jerks-Parade (Live) 09 Toxic Reasons-White Noise (Live)

Having created a set of works on analogue video between 1976 and 1980 we (Vida) decided to go to America to drive across the dream of America in search of the source of intuition. The US had provided not only Americans but people around the world - such as we three British people - with a promise of improvement, not only of our circumstance, but of ourselves. As a sometimes musician, poet, writer and painter I’d become familiar with the use of improvisation to create various artefacts and moments and recognised that element when constructing moving images on a timeline into an act of durational statement.

Chimpanzees are kept in a large enclosure at the Arnhem Research Station. There, some experiments are carried out to test the intelligence of the chimpanzees.

The almost exclusively female hands that used to glue scenes together in the film laboratory according to the director’s instructions were not recognised in a film’s credits. In a series of interviews, eight former film laboratory employees and their friends remember this challenging and little-acknowledged work from the early days of the analogue film age.

On the Indonesian island of Bali, the arts permeate almost every aspect of daily life. Gamelan music, wayang (shadow puppet) theater, dance, and elaborately constructed offerings of foods and flowers all represent attempts to please the gods and placate demons. In Balinese cosmology, demons are thought to dwell in the watery underworld, gods in the upper world, and human beings in the middle realm between the two. Much of human effort is directed toward maintaining the proper balance between these worlds, and between the forces of growth and decay.

In a medium-sized town where life has settled down, a man roams through days and nights, indifferent to everything, as he believes. His domain is a bar, an empty apartment, and the paths between them. He can no longer be with others; it drives him away from people, and he can no longer be with himself; it disgusts him. He meets a younger woman who prefers to be on the move because the thought of having to be responsible for another person or for anything else frightens her.

Initially created as an editing exercise for his students at UCSD, Jenkins’ Inconsequential Doggereal mixes poetic narrative fragments of self-shot footage with moments ripped from the unending flow of TV news, advertising, and entertainment. The images and sounds of mainstream television are jammed, freeze-framed, looped, overlaid and rewound—clips of science documentaries, movies broadcast on TV, nightly news commentary on the minimum wage, and a 60 Minutes style interview with the actor Peter Sellers are all jumbled together. Jenkins interjects several original threads, which show pickup football games gone wrong, a young white couple doing chores and hanging out at home, and Jenkins himself laying on a green suburban yard as a lawnmower moves perilously close to his body.

Based on interviews with married women, aged 20 to 40, from different social classes, the film portrays with a certain irony the hardships and the petty side of marriage. An actress plays five different women who, living in banal situations, reproduce multiple facets of subordination to the role of a good wife.

A GDR documentary from the 1980s. Sachsenplatz in modern Leipzig: Waltraut Kosetzka, 61, and 55-year-old Inge Arnold are among the women who helped to rebuild the destroyed city after the collapse of the Third Reich. The film portrays the two women, documents their biographies, accompanies them in their everyday professional and private lives and visits their old places of work as rubble women. To emphasize the importance of their work, old footage of destroyed buildings is contrasted with new buildings. It is repeatedly emphasized that their work made a decisive contribution to improving housing conditions in Leipzig. To this day, the two working women are committed to maintaining their city.

Episode six in a series of eight short films produced for TV, that sadly was never transmitted. Filmmaker Jon Coley reduced costs by taking on the starring roles, performing both innocent man and evil doppelganger. Jon chose an atmospheric Brian Eno soundtrack to perfectly meld with the action, which was shot in 1981 on location at Prestatyn's High Street and seafront. Coley's mother, Shirley, fully supported her son's endeavours, acting as cameraperson in this film. Jon Coley's inspiration came from watching cult TV series such as 'The Outer Limits', 'The Invaders' and Patrick McGoohan's 'Danger Man'. (BFI)

Short film about Basque artist Jose Mari Uzelai.

Imagogie (from words: image and demagogy) was made with 16mm and super8 inside 16mm.

Cloudy days that produce snow are great but there’s nothing quite like the days where you get to Ski in the Sun. Grab your skis and sunscreen and join along as skiers like Mike Chew, Scott Brooksbank, Karen Huntoon, Kevin Moore, Ben Jones, and tons of others show you what real skiing looks like under the brightest light in the sky. From British Columbia down to Mount Saint Helens, over to Insbrook Austria and St. Moritz Switzerland, and back to Colorado, California, and Utah join Warren Miller as he takes you around the world to some of the greatest and brightest places to ski known to man.

A loose comedy about escaped convicts.

The heroes of the story, which takes place in the present, are young people about to graduate. After prom, the fourth-graders escape to a private party, then return to school together for a farewell spree, during which a fire breaks out in the classroom. Due to the style of school investigation, students whose human and personal rights have been repeatedly violated leave the school building without permission during class. They are organized with a huge ambition to change the world together. While graduation only affects them emotionally, the baccalaureate exam turns them into individuals who recognize their individual interests.

Greedy characters attempt to use black magic to get their hands on a valuable estate. It works out about as well as you'd guess.

A model poses in bright primary colours alongside a number of oblique words. Images of a woman rotating wearing long flowing dresses are overlain and played at different speeds.

This time the confrontation Teresa Tyszkiewicz with the matter proceeds in a close analysis, although the artist's strategy is still based on the spontaneous expression of subjective experiences and impressions. Tyszkiewicz creates situations in which surrender may conduct on their premises all kinds of "tests" in order to locate their conceptual center and create the archetypal image. Starts at the numerous references and meanings, which includes formal, visual and semantic game. The artist uses the most mundane matter, and its original power of symbolic interaction, to create aesthetically refined images with his characteristic abstract beauty. Among those addressed in the film political themes (presentation of the issue of the weekly "Solidarity"), and the fight that at the end she goes with a heavy, linen sackcloth. The film ends with colored feminist scene serfdom after a failed attempt to revolutionize the fossilized perception of gender and female sexuality.

Short animated film by Tadanari Okamoto

Daniel Eisenberg's film (or "memory essay," as theorist Nora Alter referred to DISPLACED PERSON) is a challenge to a conventional view of history, a provocation using traditional documentary forms: found footage, newsreels, a radio lecture of French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and Ludwig van Beethoven's "Razumovsky" quartets.

Homage to the great Brazilian samba songwriter Noel Rosa (1910-1937).

A man smuggles in an exotic animal, but discovers too late that it's infested with some rather nasty insects.

Helmer is hunting moose in Trøndelag. He is suspected of manslaughter after a hunting team has discovered that a shot was fired with Helmer's rifle.

Film collage on the street line in St. Georg.

A former fighter pilot is forced, due to an illness, to work on utility planes in the countryside.

Various couples explore their relationships from newlyweds to those more experienced.

A film that captures the underlying tension that pervades everyday life in the age of the atomic bomb and the telephone.

A day in the life of Brutus Thornapple, a born loser who simply can't catch a break.

Documentary about guest workers in the Ruhr area. Part of the seven-part film cycle "Prosper/Ebel. Chronik einer Zeche und ihrer Siedlung".

Rarely screened documentary on West-German anti-communism and the Deutsches Friedenunion [The German Peace Union]. Made in collaboration with Kristian Romare and produced by SVT (Swedish Public Television).

A carnation planted on the moon is banished for not to flourish. Once in exile, thanks to the care and affection of a child, the flowers bloom.

On March 28th 1981, 10.000 people take to the streets. The city of Judenburg demonstrates for the preservation of their steel plant. The demonstration is a start, a late attempt to avert the threat of job loss. The film shows how the international steel crisis affects Austria.

Experimental animation techniques give an impressionistic view of a day's weather in Atlantic Canada.

In Canada, six men talk about their homosexual experiences, revealing feelings, attitudes, social prejudice and family pressures. They are men from different social classes and age groups: from a well-off young man who has just revealed his sexual orientation to his family, to an experienced 40-year-old businessman who, after having lived a double life for several years, decides to assume his homosexuality .

“Both NEW YORK LOFT and DOLL HOUSE convey a strong sense of resourcefulness, this ‘making something’ out of interiors, specifically domestic spaces. And domestic they are, in an avant-garde sort of way. The filmmaker gives plentiful evidence of arranging things, moving them, adjusting, placing and re-placing. First are poles and sticks found; second is fabric, sheets, pillows; in a third section we see round things. Circular magnets, machine parts, film cans and the like eventually become visually paralleled with the camera lens itself. The lens is seen as Barbara films into a round mirror. How different are the visions of this woman-with-a-movie-camera from Vertov of sixty years ago! Each extols the camera-eye, but Hammer replaces Vertov’s sociopolitical kino-truths with adventures in domestic space.” – Claudia Gorbman, Jump Cut

A working class Catholic family in Sydney endure tough times and misery in the 1940s. In the middle of it all, the 16-year-old son tries to cope with falling in love with a male friend.

Documentary about a small German village and its inhabitants four decades after the last remaining jewish inhabitants were chased away or put into concentration camps. Interviews with the people of the village about the past as well as with the exiled jewish community, now living in New York.

Hashiguchi's own high school years from 1979 to 1981 on 8mm.

A group of friends on vacation in Deauville take on the challenge of hitting on as many girls as possible, collecting the underwear of each of their "victims" as trophies.

A cabaret show with Odd Børretzen and Alf Cranner filmed in September 1979 at the ABC-Teateret in Oslo, Norway.

Casanova spends his last years of life as a librarian of Count Waldstein at Dux Castle. He takes farewell to love, from life - grown old, from the happiness and favor of women abandoned. Lonely, intrigues and attacks, he writes his memoirs that later became world famous. As an ageing connoisseur, he takes up a delicate relationship with the laundry Sophie, who becomes a girlfriend, interested listener and critical conversation partner...

1981 German super 8 short work