Cinematic Era: 1981 Vintage

The celestial monuments of Greece. A few blades of grass growing on the Parthenon pediment against a background of blue sky.

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.

Based on a true story, it tells the story of opera singer Paco Sierra, who, realizing that the life of an artist does not provide him with enough money, plans and carries out a terrorist act: He assures the passengers of an airplane that he has placed a bomb.

Mexican feature film

Twelve minute film noir short from 1981. The director, Elliot Lavine, is Director of Repertory Programming for the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

A dusk-till-dawn document of the dying gasps of my beloved Kodak Supermatic 200.

Experimental film on 16mm by Emanuel Țeț as part of Kinema Ikon.

The work 'Labyrinth' opens with grainy and aged sepia tone images of the artist textured with film scratches. These images are set to the sound of an old film projector evoking a nostalgic and retro feel, as if the artist is evoking memories of herself. In the opening scenes we are introduced to a still shots of the artist performing different facial expressions. America plays with the notion of capturing differing moments in time. This is done in a stop-frame mode, where single frames of her expressions are placed one after the other creating a rickety and shaky feel to the movement of the imagery. As the work progresses, America multiplies the single frame in a grid across the screen.

Sculptures are the eyes of the walls and have wartime battle scars. A reflection on changing times with a collage of archival street scenes.

Jaime Davidovichn searches in vain for the meaning of "avant-garde".

Film by Ana Mendieta, 1981

Comic animation film by Guido Manuli.

In 1935 photographer Willard Van Dyke moved to New York with the belief that films "could change the world" and began a new career as a filmmaker. His name soon became synonymous with social documentary in the U.S. His images of cottonfields, steelmills and industrial towns, and his portraits of unemployed factory workers and their families, provide an invaluable chronicle of those years and have become timeless examples of cinematic art. A candid portrait of a distinguished and outspoken man, this film includes conversations with colleagues Ralph Steiner, Joris Ivens and Donald Richie; footage of Edward Weston, his close friend and mentor; and many excerpts. It explores the dilemma of anyone with a social conscience who must face the harsh realities of earning a living while retaining their integrity. And it reveals a man in his seventies still determined to do good creative work.

Into my hands fell a 20-minute exhortation to find the right job after high school. Struck by its fierce redundancy, I undertook a distillation, editing the optical track, aiming for conversational cadence, choosing image only when silent. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Exploiting the painterly 'smear' quality of undercranked 6 fps projected S-8: Shadow hunts, I follow. - Gary Adlestein

The film wants to highlight a dream visions through a special film technique composing the colour images (like a colour photocopier at work) through red, green and blu excepts. Some sequences have colours that only add up two primary colours. in other sequences I use masks.

The last in Phil Munnoch aka Captain Zip's series of 8mm portraits of the London punk scene captures the movement in decline - and Chelsea's last gasp as a bohemian enclave. Zip's extended family of young punks - including Katie Thunder and Wobble - are still a close-knit bunch, defiantly living it up on the Kings Road. But by 1981 they were a tourist attraction, posing for photos with curious straights for a few quid.

After school special type short about illiterate high school students.

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

Recently restored, Lisa Baumgardner's punchy Girl Pack rewrites Jean-Luc Godard's famous axiom, proving that all you need to make a film is six girls and and a six-pack of beer.

“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.

A tale of how Njál, a character from the Icelandic Sagas, is burned at the stake.

"Highway 40 West" (1980/81) is the first of a series of documentaries by Hartmut Bitomsky (born 1942 in Bremen) which brought him international fame. Each of these films is dedicated to both, a specific and title-giving object and its historical-critical analysis. Such as in "Highway 40 West": For a time span of 169 minutes, the film shows Bitomsky’s emblematic US-road trip with a rented car on the eponymous road number 40, crossing the country from East to West. From early travel routes of the "Native Americans" to the trails of early colonizers, this street is loaded with American history - and with the present ruins of the American dream, which Bitomsky indulgingly captures on film. He himself appears as actor/author, conducting innumerable interviews, shooting the landscape, the diners and hotels - and his sonorous narrator’s voice reviews what is seen, and tries to understand and make it understandable.

The camera is ready for the perfect shot! The bus driver pays special attention when he notices the camera. But the cameraman is actually waiting for the bus to depart, so he can film the wonderful scenery behind the bus.

USA, 1981, colour, sound, 7 min.

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.

The West-German director Monica Maurer made a number of important films for the PLO. The Israeli airstrikes against Beirut on 17 July 1981 killed 350 people, including a pregnant woman whose baby could be rescued from her torn-up womb. Maurer shows the people’s suffering and pain, their victimhood. She addresses the systemic causes of violence, referring back to the history of their country and formulating arguments for the necessity of a fight for liberation.

The Comsat Angels - the legendary post-punk band from Sheffield, England, live recording from Mensa Wilhelmstrausse, Tuebingen, West Germany, on December 12, 1981. They were initially active from 1978 to 1995 with basically this line-up. Named after the J. G. Ballard short story. They debuted in 1979 with the "Red Planet" three-track single. This release attracted Polydor A&R man Frank Neilson and the band signed a three-album recording contract. These three albums - "Waiting for a Miracle" (1980), which included the single "Independence Day", probably their best known song, "Sleep No More" (1981) and "Fiction" (1982) - are regarded by some as their best, but only sold modestly.

Noel enlists the help of neighbors in his city apartment building to supply homemade food to make his sidewalk lemonade stand a success.

A frightening vignette about violence and hatred in American society.

A frightening vignette about violence and hatred in American society.

A frightening vignette about violence and hatred in American society.

Film by Telscher.

“A private, dark meditation on fleeting moments, sightings.” (J.B.)

“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.”

"This is the opening to a series of seven "Intrigues", inspired by Delmore Schwartz's observations on the word. These seven titles of mine center on aspects of filmmaking. This one intersperses use of prism light, underwater shooting, the echoing of shadows and other darkened fragments/ abstractions. Super 8, silent, non-narrative."

"Bach implied; splice-free, light, airy, soft-focus reflections out the back window of a car returning from the beach on a perfect summer's day. Super 8, silent, non-narritive."

While withdrawing all of his money from the bank to pay for a life saving operation for his Mother, Roy Canteen is attacked and robbed. Taking the law into his own hands Canteen thinks of many different violent ways to take his revenge. After spotting the assailant he proceeds to play out his fantasy.

1981 German super 8 short work

1981 German super 8 short work

Experimental film.

This symbolic journey evokes the personal creative wandering of the Vasulkas. The landscape, shot from a car window while driving in the Santa Fe area, is gradually transformed with more and more complicated imagery techniques.

A pilot is forced to illegally transport drugs, arms and ammunition by terrorists, who have held his daughter hostage. However, they do not release her even after he complies with their demands.

The heroine in this domestic drama is a woman with middle-class angst (Jeanne Goupil) married to an acerbic film critic with little in the way of interpersonal skills. The woman has had it with endless, meaningless twaddle from each of her husband's friends about what they think, feel, or do. She needs something more than what she faces each day, and finally blows up at her husband like a pressure cooker venting steam. The aftermath is not without its effects on both husband and wife.

People from throughout Mexico and the southern United States used to gather at the hacienda El Espinazo to meet with this healer. Was he a charlatan, or a prophet who in many ways surpassed the procedures of modern medicine?

Official entry to the first Metro Manila Film Festival in 1981 directed by Jose Yandoc and starred Ramon Revilla, Anthony Alonzo, Isabel Rivas, Rosemarie de Vera, Eddie Garcia, George Estregan, Nick Romano, Arnold Mendoza, and Laarni Enriquez.

Official entry to the first Metro Manila Film Festival in 1981 directed by Eddie Rodriguez and starred Charito Solis, Dindo Fernando, Elizabeth Oropesa, Chanda Romero, and Gina Alajar.

Official entry to the first Metro Manila Film Festival in 1981 directed by Carlo J. Caparas and starred Dante Varona, Chiqui Hollmann, Lirio Vital, Romy Diaz, Subas Herrero, Rodolfo 'Boy' Garcia, Odette Khan, and Dave Brodett.