Cinematic Era: 1981 Vintage

Two-part documentary focused on the abuse of prostitute boys.

On the 29th of April 1978, a quick clay landslide devastated large areas of the rural district of Rissa. One person died whilst 13 farms; 2 homes; a cabin and a community centre were taken by the clay masses. The Rissa landslide was caught on 8 mm cinefilm by two film amateurs. This is still used actively in avalanche preventative and educational work.

Australian independent political documentary about the US installations in Australia at Pine Gap near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

An Australian film shot on Super 8

A Comedy in which the artist's voice has been replaced by Gene Autry's. Lyon's homage to his friend, sculptor Mark di Suvero. From footage shot in 1965 and 1975.

A sensitive study of one of the twenty great monasteries of Mount Athos, a thousand year old monastic republic in northern Greece- the famous ‘Holy Mountain’ of the Orthodox church. A detailed picture of life in the 900 year old monastery of Simonopetra.”

Filmed in New York City, the documentary follows young competitors preparing for the Double Dutch Championship held at Lincoln Center’s Fountain Plaza. Observing practices, performances, and conversations with the participants, the film highlights the athletic skill, coordination, and teamwork involved in the competitive jump-rope sport while allowing the athletes to speak for themselves.

Thanks to a scam, an innocent man ends up in jail and decides to look for the person who locked him up.

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

A video by Dale Hoyt

Scripted collaboratively with King and Brintzenhofe, the filmmakers created a cinedance that takes the viewer through the thresholds of dreaming, waking, and transcendental awareness, using real and painted images of the city, a 19th century attic and outer space. King’s voice recounts a dream of space without walls, a time of childhood and ecstacy. © 1981 Robyn Brentano, Andrew Horn, Kenneth King

Pulcinella is poor and tormented by his wife. But one day a magical fish bites his line and promises to satisfy his every desire if he lets him live. From that moment all the couple's dreams come true. Until due to too much greed...

The painter André Derain and his work.

Film by Ana Mendieta, 1981

Outtakes from the movie.

"Long live dynamic geometry, the movement of points, lines, surfaces, volumes ...." - Dziga Vertov Uses precisely (mathematically) determined single-framing to give movement to static space, to give life and energy to solid objects, to duplicate/mimic the eye's true movements, to forcefully bring to consciousness an inherent symmetry and balance in the visual field. Images: deadened railroad tracks, ice plant fields, Bethlehem Steel smokestack, Canyon Cinema office, back porch clouds and sky, PG&E plant at Moss Landing ....

The theme of "David and Goliath" is varied through colors, structures and shades in a kind of workshop film. Collage-like graphic elements, materials and different fabrics are used to allow form, color and structure to be experienced in their correspondence to each other and to movement and music.

The hero of the film loses his family during the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire and fights against Turkish militiamen. Disappointed in his life, Miro finds refuge in Soviet Armenia. His love for a refugee girl sparks his willingness to create a family and start a new life.

Presents a filmed portrait of noted American photographer Ansel Adams who talks about his role as a teacher, conservationist and artist.

A lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection between touch and sight to be the basis for a new cinema. The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific analysis of the sense of touch.

When the culture of a kingdom dictates that in finding the most suitable man for the beautiful princess of the kingdom, the man must emerge champion of a collective, non-discriminatory wrestling contest. Kadara is a charming and swooning tale of rivalry between a handsome and endearing farmer and a brutish man of considerable wealth for the hand of the most beautiful princess in the entire Kingdom!

A film about South American immigrants who try to live in Sweden without a job.

Joy Unspeakable is an ethnographic film that examines the question, what does it mean to be Pentecostal, through the documentation of three types of Oneness Pentecostal services in Southern Indiana: a gospel-rock concert, a regular Sunday service, and a camp meeting. Religious behavior, doctrine, and social values are discussed by several Oneness Pentecostal church members and ministers in interviews interspersed with footage of the various services.

Anne consults the dictionary in this one – what is “fat?” what is “thin?” Inanimate objects are animated, and Anne experiences problems with her camera. (Liz Coffey)

Journey back to ancient Egypt as Uriel’s students relive past lives through psycho-drama. This incredible video program is a psychodrama that is lifting the veil from a reality previously unknown in the pages of history. Isis and Osiris were two highly advanced spiritual beings from another world who came to Earth 12,000 years ago to teach humankind the Science of Life and the reality of spiritual evolution.

The Laziest Girl in Town features the transvestite antics of Morrisroe, Stephen Tashjian (Tabboo!), and Jack Pierson, culminating in an obscene sequence reminiscent of John Waters' Pink Flamingos.

One of a trilogy of animated shorts based on Moravian folk ballads.

“Although the title refers to a condition of acute malnutrition in which a child is unable to assimilate food, the film is a robust and sumptuous offering. This is no rough-edged, craft-resistant effort. Rather it is infused with a seductive glamour.” –Janis Crystal Lipzin, ARTWEEK

The film consists of 25 scenes. Each scene is performed by eight actors [out of a group of nine]; the ninth actor continually changing places with another actor who appears in only one or two scenes. The music plays a role like an actor: as soon as the music speaks the actors are silent. The writing of the scenario and making of the film were mainly a question of searching for a 'theme', and the film itself is also concerned with 'what it's about'. This 'unstated' aspect is approached from all its related facets. Scenes were made on the themes of anger, love of pleasure, refusal, disintegration, fear. Both the images, and the texts rise above the everyday level and are no longer narrative. (Wim Schlebaum)

Here Come the Puppets! is a special that was taped for PBS during the 1980 World Puppetry Festival. Co-hosted by Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson, it featured performances by Burr Tillstrom, Shari Lewis, Bil Baird and the Muppets. Other performers included Sergei Obraztsov, Manteo's Sicillian Marionettes (from NYC), Albrecht Roser, Bruce Schwartz, Martin Stevens, and Frank Ballard's (at the time, Puppet Arts head at University of Connecticut) "Ring of the Nibbelung."

A documentary about the 1981 earthquake in Irpinia.

What will become of the American who crossed the seas to visit his ancestors’ graves? After reading his own name on a tombstone will things take a turn for the worse? Never underestimate the perils of sketching in a graveyard, perhaps that uneasy presence is not just an overactive imagination. Take care next time you walk through the long grass after watching this film it will never feel the same again.

A singular cinematic figure, San Francisco’s Mike Henderson became one of the first independent African-American artists to make inroads into experimental filmmaking in the 1960s. Henderson’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, from which this program of 16mm films is culled, thrums with a sociopolitical, humorous sensibility that lends his small-scale, often musically kissed portraits (which he later dubbed “blues cinema”) a personal, artisanal quality. - Film Society of Lincoln Center. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

Documentation of a 3-projector super-8 film performance. (one projector is hand-held by the filmmaker and moves during performance) Government Property acknowledges a film's familiar function to present the illusion of another time and space while, at the same time, presenting elements which allow the viewer to also experience an event in the present tense. The latter is suggested by including elements of the projection experience such as interchanging images amongst the projectors, shadows, and varying the size and position of the hand-held projected image. The title originated from the words "government property" which are printed on each sheet of toilet paper in the British Museum. The film images, shot between 1978 and 1981, include British newspaper accounts of the Queen of England, media news coverage of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, and other cultural and political monuments such as Stonehenge, the Salisbury (England) train station; the Trans-Canadian Railroad,

Hors Titre I (Off-Title I) is a hermetic movie deliberately mysterious. Figure interpreted by Stuart Sherman shines in the first part of the film by his anonymity. The man drowned in the crowd, activity, all this urban life that is foreign to him. It expresses nothing, does nothing, to the point of appearing to blur the image. In the second part, it works. Always very mysteriously. The viewer built himself a sense of all these actions cut by the film. Whatever it is, its activity is internalized: slide analysis, reading, writing. The outlines of this figure then draw, and blend back into the urban landscape, this time in the open. The character became somebody through a symbolic initiation: nighter? read de Sade? photographic activity? maybe three at a time, perhaps in a dream. The key is in becoming.

In a radio program, an old man narrates his rugged existence.

The great Georg Solti conducts a spectacular studio production of this masterpiece of 20th century opera. Two internationally celebrated Hungarian opera stars perform Bartók's darkly psychological parable with searing dramatic intensity.

The film is a superimposition of 6 to 8 takes. In each take, a horizontal piece of white paper was moved around in front of the camera by hand.

Short film about Berlin Kreuzberg.

“A simplistic analogy of obvious disparities between these two masters that I concocted on the beach in Provincetown. As a disclaimer: my filmed comparisons relating H.F. & S.B. should in no way be construed with the quality or intentions of these high priests of filmmaking. Just koaning around.” (J.B.)

“The opening to a series of seven films inspired by Delmore Schwartz’s observations on the word ‘intrigue’. My series regards various aspects of personal visuals, including the process of shooting, splicing, repetition, projection and editing bench equipment. Much of the imagery exists within a darkened ambiguity. Intrigues (I), intersperses prismatic light, underwater shooting, echoing of shadows and other low-lit fragments/ precipitous moments of activities.” (J.B.)

How the boy Vasya and the owl Dusya went to look for the missing sun.

Based on the fairy tale of the same name by Evgeny Permyak.

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. But the darkness is not ‘night,’ or even simply some more abstract absence of light, but a more profound vacuum: it represents a world stripped of all the coordinates of the known, an unmeasurable absence. […] These lushly sensual, pleasurable-to-view films are also terrifying: their unpredictability, continually enacting new dramas of surprise, alternatively swamps the viewer in light and leaves him adrift in darkness.”