Cinematic Era: 1983 Vintage

One of the early short films of Italian director Fabio Salerno.

Documentary from 1983 about suppressed technology and UFOs based on Stan Deyo’s book of the same name.

11-year-old René loves his Punch and Judy puppets and dreams of becoming a kindergarten teacher - a dream for which he is often ridiculed and even his father shows little understanding. Deeply hurt, he withdraws and finds solace in the children's home, where he plays stories to the young children with his puppets.

A documentary depicting the activities of Śmierć Kliniczna, one of the most famous rock bands of the 1980s in Poland.

Harry is a television journalist crossing Canada by train to a family event in Newfoundland. While travelling, the journalist is making a documentary about Canada and reassessing his life in response to a friend’s suicide. - http://tiff.net/CANADIANFILMENCYCLOPEDIA/content/bios/william-d-macgillivray

Forestry workers isolated by winter on a mountaintop. Loves, longings, nostalgias and vital questions. From the first film, Cărmăzan reveals his inclination towards a certain magical surrealism that he later develops.

Documentary about the life of opera singer Teresa Stratas

It is the time when riot police buses were parked in front of university gates, and the campus was under the surveillance of police officers in disguise. After a protesting student commits suicide by throwing oneself out of the library building, the police install mosquito nets on the library windows.

Horror short.

Mexican feature film

In a small Swedish town, the murder of Frome, the owner of a public relations research firm, takes place. A day later, his friend Touraine, the police commissioner leading the investigation, is killed...

Throbbing Gristle performing live at the Kezar Pavillion in San Francisco, California on the evening of May 29th, 1981. This would be TG's last show until reforming in 2002.

An imprisoned tough guy acts as a stool pigeon for the authorities, an action that violates the tough guys’ ideal code of conduct.

Frontline correspondent Charles Cobb journeys to a Washington, DC that tourists rarely see. The nation's capital, seventy-five percent black, faces widespread poverty, [despite being] run by some of the civil-rights movement's most effective and militant organizers, including Mayor Marion Barry

A poetic vision of the city Brasília.

Richard Kern’s 1983 film "American Obsessions" features David Wojnarowicz interacting with plaster heads from his “Metamorphosis” sculpture series. Kern went on to create two more films with David, "Stray Dogs" from his series Manhattan Love Suicides, 1984 and "You Killed Me First," 1985.

A video short created in collaboration with Takashi Inagaki.

A tenement house in Poznan as a background of social changes and political events in the history of Poland in the 20th century. Shop signs, languages, banners and wall inscriptions change - the tenement is still the same.

A moving and graphic portrait of the people of wartorn Beirut in their day-to-day struggle to survive in the rubble and despair. Filmed shortly after the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Chatila, the film gives a vivid picture of the plight of these people and of any people who are too poor to escape the ravages of war.

A review of television variety series and specials.

On grazing in the region of Zuberoa, in the Northern Basque Country.

"A unique kind of lyricism comes through and hovers over the images on the screen like the light that projects and contains them." –Ernie Gehr on Jim Jennings' films

A three-dimensional animation of a pre Columbian textile. The Paracas textile, 300-100 BC, was found in a tomb in the south coast desert of Perú, and is a part of the collection of The Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Mrs. Ahrens is preparing for her trip to the Maldives by trying out her XXL diving suit when she collides with the gay couple living on the same floor for an improvised Xmas Eve gathering starring a special guest, the famed singer Boris.

Short film.

A portrait of the social and political landscape of Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, on the 15th anniversary of the start of the modern Troubles.

The audience observes the parallel events of a prostitute servicing a client intercut with a film producer visiting an old friend and guiltily offering him money for sex. "In a month of the blue moon a victim may rail with heroic defiance, but humiliation and restoration of order are inevitable." -Andrew Paterson, Parachute, February 1984

A film about the pressure which society puts upon people to project different images, particularly the image of success. Through the medium of potato printing the film shows how Madame Potatoe struggles to cope within the world in which she is placed. She retreats into the earth leaving her image to continue along its own increasingly exploitative path. Madame Potatoe was first shown as part of Emma Calder's MA show at the RCA, which comprised a life-sized, motorised Madame Potatoe eating crisps and watching the film on telly. She was sat in a room papered with Madame Potatoe print wall paper. Shown at the Tate Gallery, animation festivals, CH4 TV and world wide TV. Madame Potatoe print bought by the V&A for the prints and drawings collection. Many press clippings and associated articles are available.

The film comprises a total of six episodes: in each, the authors seek to highlight the personal problems and feelings of three French and three German female filmmakers.

Writes Schneemann: "Souvenir of Lebanon follows a long video pan through destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese villages. In 1982-83, Israeli ceaseless bombardments destroyed bridges, farms, roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, apartments, and historic sites and towns dating back 2000 years. The live color footage was received unexpectedly from an anonymous news photographer. It is intercut with black and white disaster stills I re-shot from daily newspapers, edited in juxtaposition with color slides of bucolic Lebanon given to me on the day the Lebanese tourist bureau in New York city closed." "Souvenir of Lebanon is the video component for the kinetic sculpture War Mop; a flailing motorized mop rises on plexiglass cams and is dropped, slapping the video monitor every eight seconds. The sound on the video recorded layers of reverberation as the mop hit the monitor."

Documentary about three artists from the Basque Country.

The only doco to record the early years of Australian jazz. This lovingly compiled celluloid history of the Melbourne jazz scene is a fascinating study of an era and a social milieu, as well as a music documentary. Revisit Melbourne's early years with Benny Featherstone, the Early Conventions, jive with Frank Johnson's fabulous Dixielanders at Collingwood Town Hall, a riverboat trip up the Yarra, Dave Dallwitz, Graeme Bell in Czechoslovakia in 1947.

Artist Martha Rosler identifies the totalitarian implications of an argument for torture under certain circumstances, as it appears in the editorial pages of Newsweek magazine.

Commissioned by Projects UK in Newcastle upon Tyne, England and featured on the Pieces compilation VHS. "A trip to Yugoslavia."

This is an impressionistic portrayal of the 1982 folk festival at Tracy and Eloise Schwarz’s farm in Central Pennsylvania. The festival, dedicated that year to the legendary Elizabeth Cotton, includes Bluegrass, Old Timey, Cajun, Country, and Gospel music. In contrast to the easygoing atmosphere of the festival, the film is a frenetic swirl of elaborately collaged shapes derived from traditional Pennsylvania Dutch designs. While sometimes the music seems to animate the image, at others the image itself becomes visual music on its own, eliciting ephemeral and sometimes forlorn emotions. The film offers an unusual meeting of a folk tradition and the avant garde, implying a fundamental connection between the two.

A boy and a girl successfully walk to school in the eighties.

Their friendship and courage were shown along with their eagerness to learn about the natural world.

March 1983. Spanish painter Ocaña held an event for children at the Museum of Fine Arts of Santander, where he introduced them to his exhibition and creative process, answered their questions, and raffled off several artworks.

Louis Gzinterman runs a dry goods store on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village. He gives food and shelter to homeless, unemployed and transient young men who are "kind of lost." Louis is foster father to "his boys," many of whom now have children of their own and still correspond with their one-time benefactor. Now in his eighties, Louis shows no signs of relinquishing his charitable work. This portrait records his daily routine at home and in his tiny store.

Short by Nancy Buchanan.

A group of children go on top of a cliff in Grímsey to collect some eggs.

A group of children orphaned during the American bombing raids is sent to a small school in the countryside. Here, the children continue their education, all while learning how to deal with grief and find joy in daily life again.

Experimental film on 16mm by Marcela Muntean as part of Kinema Ikon.

Short film made using a pinhole camera

An excellent performance of this delightful opera. The principals are superb, especially the sisters. Bruscantini as Don Alfonso is past his prime, but he knows and understands the role inside out, so one does not even notice his vocal limitations. Araiza is in top form as Ferrando, and Morris makes virile Guglielmo. The only disappointment is Battle as Despina. Unlike her partners, she does not have feel for the Mozart ensemble, and her vocal mannerisms are totally unbecoming. How the producers allowed that to happen is a mystery. Muti's conducting is terrific, much better than on his La Scala video, where he is uninvolved.

A visceral personal response to surviving a near-fatal case of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Toxic Shock combines intimate taboos of needles, blood and tampons with tried and true hands-on self-defense, set to a spare, penetrating and unknown score provided by a cassette tape gifted by a forgotten friend. A call to arms; what will you do in defense of your body? "Penetration up the wazoo, blood, fire, gas, needles, tampons, liquid power and cocktails of the burning sort. My experimental response to sweating out near death with Toxic Shock Syndrome." --Vanessa Renwick

Documentary film.

A discourse on marketing through images. The "surface" is an abstract potpourri of polyrhythms, "named" items jumping into recognition here and there. I pulled magazine ink off the page with scotch tape and glued the tape strips onto film leader and rephotographed. It is a tale of coming to terms, of suspended disbeliefs.