Cinematic Era: 1983 Vintage

Currey's Red in Blue Letters weaves images recorded by the filmmaker from contrasting settings into a delightful and mysterious conundrum of rhyming forms and colors

The young Greek filmmaker Menelaos Carayannis made some films for the Film Works before returning to Athens and establishing himself as a documentary filmmaker. The promise is an unassuming but poignant short film about a Greek family in Stockholm and about the double loyalties of the exile situation: Will they return to Greece or stay in the new country?

A Super-8 film by Leslie Singer

I filmed the video as if playing with shadows, listening to the birds singing on the top of a small hill and feeling the height of the sky from the sound of airplanes passing overhead. I filmed and edited the video in three parts. I came up with the next video from the first edited video and filmed the second video, and then came up with the third video from the second edited video. It took me a year to complete it, but it felt like a year of struggling to write a haiku. I used natural sounds recorded live on location without editing, but it was strange how they somehow matched the edited footage as if they were calculated.

Bosnian documentary art film.

Barbara, a fifty-year-old lesbian whose lifespan has taken her through correction homes, mental hospitals, prisons and bouts of prostitution, approached Bruno Moll suggesting that she made a film of her life. Moll agrees and hires an actress, Serena Way. To interpret episodes in Barbara’s past. Barbara has in mind a Hollywood-style bio starring an actress on the order of Susan Hayward dramatically telling her story of a life ruined by bourgeois standards. The result is a semi-documentary mixing black and white segments of Barbara and Serena discussing the project with color scenes depicting little stories from the 1950’s, the heyday of bourgeois existence.

An intimate portrait of the director's sister: German model and former Playboy Playmate Hilde Kulbach.

Once upon a time a baker and a chimney sweep decide to change their jobs and it causes a lot of trouble.

Starring Maribel Mejia as a young woman who goes on a road trip reeling from a string of heartbreaks and bad relationships, Minter’s early collaboration with her then-partner Rocha feels more apiece with the French New Wave influences of a successive generation. (She spoke admiringly about Godard in an interview, but described her later ideas as more directly influenced by Dziga Vertov.) There isn’t a ton of evidence of the staccato editing that would mark NADIE ES INOCENTE, but one prolonged sex scene – in which a furiously edited sequence of sound effects takes center stage over abstracted imagery – can only hint at the individual liberation to follow.

An analysis of the use of photomontage to distort meaning and create subversive and oppositional art, exemplified by the work of Peter Kennard.

TREASURE OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE is a film made in 1983 that honors both the videogames and the monsters of Universal. It has aired on HBO a few times, but has long been overlooked in the following decades.

FLAP (1983) is a very direct approach to moviemaking. A 3x5 card waved in front of the line of a projector beam, shot from a perpendicular angle to the projector. A good old-fashioned light/shadow play.

After a phone call, a woman suddenly decides to leave her husband as a child. She finds herself in an inn populated by strange individuals. A new life is offered to her.

A bad dog learns to be good.

Christoph Schlingensief puts an end to the misery of "new German film production" and at the same time kicks off a new start without stale romanticism and mysticism.

Produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates, Expeditions 1 – Signs of Empire is the first of a two-part 35mm slide-tape text entitled Expeditions; part two is entitled Images of Nationality. The work toured England from November 1984 to March 1985, using a Kodak dissolve unit to sequence images into narrative. The soundtrack to Signs of Empire, which consisted of tape loops of musique concrete and political speeches, was amplified to create a powerful environment of dread.

Documentary film.

Film made by passing - passing through - passing through - passing from an erotic desire to a filmic desire. The eye slipping from one object of desire to another. Some pass, others enjoy. Ejaculation film during the transition from winter to spring. Suites d'enfilades, suites d'enculades. Suites of variations on the theme of the passage. Passage from underground to overground. Switch from black and white to color. Passage from day to night - passengers in the shade. Passage of desire. Switching from one image to another. Passage - message. Passage from the near to the far, from the far to the near: setting in the abyss. New fleeting visions in a public passage that does not lead to the metro.

Snapshots from the life of the eccentric Tohm di Roes, who angrily shouts against the philistines with the wild gesture of punk.

Stephen C. Ning's "Freckled Rice" also has a roving teen-ager at its center, in this case a 13-year-old Chinese-American boy. Joe (J. P. Wing) and his parents are scheduled to move from Boston's Chinatown to New Hampshire, where his father plans to open a Polynesian restaurant; in the meantime, Joe wanders off to join his older brother, whose Americanized manner has brought about a major rift with his more traditional parents. "Freckled Rice," with a title that means to suggest the conflict of these two cultures, is in both Cantonese and English, and tells its story in a simple and credible manner. - NY Times

A work-in-progress about middle class African American parents discussing why they have ordered their daughter to get rid of her afro.

Among Robertson’s most accomplished animated works is this collage film inspired by her struggles with binge eating and obsessive magazine collecting. Ronald Reagan is referenced in the playfully militarized jelly beans that were his favorite candy.

A story about first love of three twelve years old boys to an older girl.

The film starts with voice over by Julie (Jill Delaney) which sets the minimalist plot running as she rides on her Ducati 750 into Melbourne.

Documentary about the Urban Hospital in Berlin.

Taiwan's Martial Law provisions included laws clearly suppressing assembly, demonstrations, and forming of organizations. Nonetheless, one afternoon on a holiday in 1983, five youths appeared on Ximending Street dressed in white khaki pants and wearing cotton bags over their heads. A document of dissident action during this period.

About how, despite the machinations of the witch and the evil spirit Davy, the old man managed to tell the children a fairy tale with a happy ending.

How a penguin from the South Pole and a bear cub from the North became friends.

Based on the fairy tale by L.N. Tolstoy "Freeze, Freeze, Wolf's Tail".

A Noite de Walpurgis is a fantastic tale by Hugo Rocha, admittedly inspired by Goethe's Faust. The narrator-protagonist reveals a story told to him by a third person. Here the third person is an old peasant woman that the protagonist finds in a walk through the mountains, and that tells a story that in turn would have been told to her by the grandmother.

Collage-like depiction of the life of a man, in which the protagonist prefers intimate childhood memories over earthly gain. About the sound of new shoes, walks with dad and the smell of elm wood.

One of the first experiment with the camera and with the editing splicer. A fast edited film using materials from several 3min films shot in the streets of Boston.

The transformation of an image. A woman suddenly transfigured breast and cut, like the Amazon, making new weapons: the bow and arrow.

Slayer at The Concert Factory, Costa Mesa, CA, USA Halloween Evil Has No Boundaries Aggressive Perfector Crionics The Final Command The Antichrist Black Magic Die by the Sword Fight Till Death Show No Mercy

Schatzl's schizophrenic animation of planes and falling paratroopers

When the Araki gang harass Bok-Sun, Chil-Bok kills Araki by heading. Bak Jang-Sohn hides Bok-Sun and Chil-Bok in danger. Japanese policemen arrest and send Chil-Bok to prison and Park Jang-Sun run away. Released from the prison owing to the liberation of the country, Chil-Bok punishes the scoundrels with heading. And because of it, he meets Bok-Sun again but she runs away from him. Song Dal-Su dominates the underworld of Seoul and goes to Pyeong-Yang Myeon-Ok and beats off Park Jang-Sohn for he's been afraid of him who knows about his past. Chil-Bok meets Bok-Sun through a pickpocket's arrangement and hears from her about Song Dal-Su. Chil-Bok makes Song Dal-Su give in who is the foe of his father and lover.

Ron Tandberg is Australia's best known political cartoonist. This film follows through Tandberg's work on the front page of the Melbourne 'Age' on one particular night's edition. This document is significant for its depiction of the production of a broadsheet newspaper (including it printing) in 1983 and the dramatic change in production since computerisation was introduced shortly afterwards.

A dramatic reconstruction of a turn-of-the-century incident involving African slaves in South America.

Continuously moving across a hazy landscape, translucent layers multiplying and decreasing, with several points of view across land and screen surfaces.

Since retiring as a master wood carver, Carlo Fusetti has carved a gift, an inheritance for his granddaughter. But now his health keeps him from his work. A moving lyrical film about an artist facing mortality.

Heera (Kunal Goswami) is a Hindu but loves a beautiful young girl, Ruby (Maneesha Kohli) who is Catholic. Ruby's dad, Steven (Satyen Kappu) strongly opposes any ties between the two lovers, and even has Heera thrown in prison. Heera's dad, Bholanath (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) forbids his son from seeing Ruby again, and locks Heera up in his room. Heera's mom (Sonia Sahni) is torn between the father and son conflict. Are Heera and Ruby fated to be together? Or will their love also end tragically?

The Gold Rush. A new frontier. Nineteenth century California offered women the opportunity to pioneer new roles for themselves. Meet Babe Bean, the "trouser puzzle" who escaped the hot glare of tabloid headlines by disguising herself as Jack Garland and serving in the Spanish American War. Or Jeanne Bonnet who scored a record of 22+ arrests for wearing male attire, went to prison for her indiscretions and later organized a group of prostitutes into a shoplifting ring!

This documentary examines one family's desperate search for faith and religious meaning in Muncie, Indiana.

A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.

A documentation during four days of the creation of a Playboy magazine centerfold photograph from start to finish.

Covers the fledgling organization, NASA, reaching several milestones in 1960–61. These milestones included two highly successful unmanned orbital flights, the world's first weather and passive communications satellite, and two manned suborbital flights. This video is part of the NASA at Work series produced by Lewis Research Center.

The beginning of NASA in 1958 and its early programs are highlighted. Because of a launch success rate of less than a third, NASA starts a quality control program. This video is part of the NASA at Work series produced by Lewis Research Center.

A television documentary produced for British Television directed by Peter Greenaway about Phillip Glass that is a recording of a performance of the Phillip Glass Ensemble in 1983 with interviews that go in depth of his style and music theory of his signature minimal sound.

From March to June 1983, the Dutch comedian Freek de Jonge performed his fifth solo performance: De mythe ('The myth'). In the programme booklet he included the following quote from Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski: 'Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is in its living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived.'

A strange legend says that the Sun of ancient Peru, contrary to what history and tradition maintain, was not a source of life and fertility, but of destruction and death. This led to the ideas of the apocalypse and the end of history being embodied in episodes that occurred at various points in Peruvian history. In the past, a young woman from the viceregal aristocracy falls in love with a leper. In the present, drug addiction spreads, with the consequence of multiple social tensions. In the future, the fear of nuclear holocaust moves a character, Dr. Olmar, to warn humanity of the impending risk.