Cinematic Era: 1985 Vintage

Marc Karlin looks at film production in Britain.

USA + USSR = USSA. My film is about blurred boundaries, probably due to my own personal history. I was born in New York, to Russian and Czech parents, raised in Brazil and educated in France. As a result, the film is a cultural cocktail shot on super 8 in New York, Berlin, Milan and Paris.

Robakowski directs the camera to zoom back and forth.

Documentary to prevent the closing of the Thedebad in Hamburg-Altona.

Film student Arlene Bowman (Navajo) travels to the Reservation to document the traditional ways of her grandmother. The filmmaking persists in spite of her grandmother's forceful objections to this invasion of her privacy. Ultimately, what emerges is a work which abruptly calls into question issues of "insider/outsider" status in a portrait of an assimilated Navajo struggling to use a "white man's" medium to capture the remnants of her cultural past.

Film by Karmakar.

Agüero interrupts the filming of 5 films that are being made in Chile in 1984, to ask each director the meaning in their work, at a time when making films in Chile was almost prohibited.

Onstage at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, the American Ballet Theatre presents a variety of numbers from several recognized ballets, both traditional and modern, including Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet," Gottschalk's "Great Galloping Gottschalk," Tchaikovsky's "The Black Swan," Handel's "Airs" and Chausson's "Jardin aux Lilas." The San Francisco Opera Orchestra provides accompaniment for the dazzling performances.

Based on the short story "Continuidad en los Parques" by Julio Cortázar

The film is a late payoff with a Genius, who took his job more important as the politics that led to total destruction.

Documentary film about the effects of the housing situation of Turkish foreign worker families on their children.

The rules of the game are set by a child who is asked questions by the director about love, jealousy, the number of people involved, kissing and kissing in the film. Two women and two men then act out human relationships according to set rules - as desire, love, jealousy, anger, indifference, tenderness, arguments, separation, staying together, conversation, getting used to each other, longing.

A documentary on the history of Hawaiian music.

Nathanael, a young scientist, arrives in a small resort town. A sensitive and kind mentor not only becomes the idol of all boys who dream of long-distance travel, but also engages children in the search for treasures hidden in a medieval fortress.

The film tells about man's love for nature and the importance of preserving the environment.

This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queen poignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.

Buttenhausen, a village: 1933 - 1942 Television journalist Lea Rosh interviews residents and Jewish visitors in Buttenhausen about their memories of the coexistence of Christians and Jews in this village in the Swabian Alb. Her reports on everyday life under National Socialism shed light on the situation of the people at that time.

A fun packed musical video showing kids and grown ups too the positive results of living by Gods priorities!

Provides a colorful portrait of dancer Mura Dehn. Born and trained in Russia, she went to Paris in 1925, met Josephine Baker and discovered jazz. Tells how she came to New York and choreographed jazz tunes. Includes a live interview with Mura Dehn along with archival footage. In the 1930’s, the heart of jazz dancing was Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Mura Dehn, a Russian dancer who was converted to jazz dance by Josephine Baker, spent her life documenting this cultural explosion from jazz to be-bop. As excerpts of her film, THE SPIRIT MOVES are shown, she discusses the eras. The film concludes with Dehn, at 82, filming a break-dance troupe. Blue Ribbon winner, American Film Festival.

That evening, in the Vosges mountains, a snowstorm swept through the valley. Within the walls of a farmhouse, another deluge descends on a family watching over one of its members on his deathbed in a heavy atmosphere, favorable to the return of old superstitions... Can they still hope for a spark to shake them out of their torpor?

Documentary celebration of Ewan MacColl on his 70th birthday

A perverted nerd uses his computer to determine that his ideal mate would be a teacher. Painting his face kabuki-white to gain confidence, he kidnaps two female high-school students and makes them his rape-torture slaves until they help him nab their teacher. In an abandoned building, the rapes and tortures continue until the teacher finally gets the psychopath's makeup off, rendering him terrified and harmless.

Frank Zappa stopped by the Night Flight studios in 1985 to talk about music videos, censorship, the PMRC and what it's like to play in his band.

Legendary stories of the great doctor Bian Que in the Spring and Autumn period.

Conceived as a political pamphlet, developed in a rhetorically grotesque vein, the film deals with the activity and the shameful end of the traitor organization of Balli Kombetar during WW2 in Albania.

A young girl, leaving prison, decides to break with her criminal past.

Roxanna Bonilla-Giannini explores the religious myth of Latin America: the apparition of the Virgin.

It's a work that I didn't originally think about showing to people, so I wonder if this is all right ... I can't help it anymore.

On an island in the Pacific Ocean, 20,000 km from Norway, lives Aroma who is 12 years old. With a camera in his suitcase, the filmmaker traveled to visit him with his family.

A 16mm record of the anti-nuclear demonstration in Melbourne, Australia on Palm Sunday 1985. The soundtrack is made from several group chants recorded at Down to Earth Confests during the 1980's.

The woman interviewed in Meninas De Um Outro Tempo, who were born at the turn of the century and live in the same nursing home, open up to filmmaker Maria Inês Villares about sex, loneliness and their dead husbands. Villares’s connection to the home is only revealed, obliquely, towards the end of the film. In her words, the film is "a reflection on life when there is little of it left".​

A video by Dale Hoyt

In the large ward of a military hospital, a child of about ten years old crawls under the beds of the wounded. To keep him away from the turmoil of war, his mother sends him to an elderly Lutheran woman, Mother Cazal, who lives with her daughter Suzanne in a house lost in the mountains.

Originally broadcast on PBS, the film features the Barrios, a middle-class family both activated and fractured by the conflict. Instead of fleeing their country, the siblings are guided by a religious and socialist desire to help those most vulnerable and destitute, mostly peasants in the rural areas.

Directed by Christoph Janetzko.

Performance video about a holiday romance at St Ives, Cornwall.

The fifth of five parts of Klaus Wyborny's "Lieder der Erde" / "Song of the Earth" cycle of films, whose theme is "the emergence of modern European civilization." The series comprises five large parts, which are in turn divided into various selections or short films.

You will hear the master storyteller, Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, and see the Holy Land right in your own home with this exciting production! Imagine, actually being able to see the sights and hear the sounds and story of the land where Jesus and the ancient prophets walked. From Cana where Jesus performed His first recorded miracle, to the sea of Galilee, where He calmed the storm and walked on the water, you'll see the beauty of the places where these and many other miracles took place. You'll also learn about how Priesthood power controls matter through intelligence.

Part of BFI collection "Your Children and You."

A beautiful woman screams at something unseen off camera. Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is probably one of George Barber's best Scratch works and is a deft reworking of cinematic narrative and cliché. George Barber is one of the pioneers of Scratch Video which emerged in the UK during the mid-1980s. Scratch video makes use of found images from films and television, cutting seemingly incongruous imagery together to make a new meaning; it has been compared to the record-scratching techniques of hip-hop music, hence the name. (lux.org.uk)

Film starring Mohnish Bahl, Jagdeep and Nutan

"The radio waves could be the breeze stirring the trees. The pedestrians swim and bob among these visceral transmissions; the total image seems suddenly so ethereal that the film's title, taken from a 1940s pulp magazine, becomes fact. Is the sound emanating from the phone booths or contained inside people's heads? As usual Gehr uses the simplest possible means to effect a subtle derangement in perception. Signal—Germany on the Air is a substantial addition to an oeuvre which is already among the most impressive in American film." - J. Hoberman

Short Animated Film.

The film authors cautiously approach the village of Gossliwil in Bucheggberg, Solothurn, with its 160 inhabitants, and sift through traces of a rural culture of survival under modern conditions without romanticization. Knowledge of the destructive threat of industrialization and the mechanisms of a global food market for the farming world is included in the research. The farmers themselves have their say; at the same time, their tradition is traced in pictures, deliberate narrative rhythm, repetitions and sayings. The result is a clever analysis of Swiss agricultural policy, whose clear structure never slips into nostalgia; a highlight of Swiss documentary filmmaking.

The story of a rich spoilt brat, trying to re-discover himself after running away from his father

Short documentary film about Hungary, which is unique among European countries due to its particularly rich mineral, thermal, and medicinal water resources, ranking fifth worldwide.

The story of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat responsible for saving thousands of lives from the Nazi Holocaust.