Cinematic Era: 1986 Vintage

Resonating with a melancholy poetry, J.S. Bach is a subjective essay that merges a reflection on identity and the creative process with a lyrical documentary on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Shot in the wintry landscapes of Bach's native East Germany, this densely layered, nuanced work intertwines biography with Downey's personal visual and verbal commentary. Three nonlinear narrative strands function as a spoken fugue, while three compositions provide the musical "voice" of Bach. The tripartite structure — Death, Flashback, and Counterpoint — and complex, associative visual strategies function as a compositional analogy to Bach's own musical principles of equal temperament and counterpoint — the "organization of multiple melodies into a clear, rhythmic and harmonic relation." This fourth part of The Thinking Eye series was termed a "stunningly beautiful video... a profound vision under masterful technical control," by the L.A. Weekly.

Short film by Anne-Marie Sirois.

Woman reads a manifesto to a small crowd in a bar.

Ekoma is a young man in a Pygmy tribe whose hardscrabble life gets harder when his father dies. Compounding this is his relationship with his fiancée, whom he cannot marry because she’s been enslaved by a local village elder.

Myriam tells her story. Like her mother¸ she decided to occupy a vacant lot to build a house to live in with her children. She constants aims to express affection towards her children, and avoid repeating her bitter childhood due to the harsh treatment she received from her mother and those around her. She wants to harness all her energy — which as a child she perceived in her gaze as having an enormous destructive capacity — to become a leader of her community.

A collection of short shorts, a dozen or so short episodes and gags in 32 minutes. From the hilarious to the thought-provoking, all of the short films have an urban sense of humour, especially the second half, "My right hand, my left foot and the back of my head at the age of 23", which is full of wit and humour, firing like a machine gun. In the latter half of the film, the witty monologue and the rhythmical development of the images are beautifully synchronized, and the light but flexible "23-year-old me" speaks eloquently of his existence. Many of the film's gags are made up of deformed gags about the funny things that happen in the daily life of the author, a student, and the uniqueness of the characters makes this a film that will be loved by many people.

One of the most pivotal Serbian bands tour Yugoslavia with the top 5 ensemble of their singers: Šemsa Suljaković, Kemal Malovčić, Mile Kitić, Dragana Mirković and Sinan Sakić.

For the first time, the filmmaker, who has previously focused his camera on his parents, friends and cats, chooses a woman as his subject for this film, which consists of three parts, each of which captures a different woman. In each of the three parts, the camera captures a different woman: the first woman dances in a muddy clearing, returns to her room, smokes a kisser, takes off her clothes and enters into a strange world of sensuality with the artist; the second woman just stands there. The third woman strolls through the winter streets in high spirits, performing wherever she can. The artist simply stares at the three women and says nothing. However, he does not miss the eroticism that emerges from his subjects, and the women's sexuality drifts through the succession of unhurried, diary-like images.

The filmmaker courts the muse of computer art. At the gods' demand Calypso grants Odysseus freedom, but gives a cloak designed to drown. The melodic constriction of Schubert's "Das Wandern" paces an emerging imposition of grid upon randomness. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

A lonely writer meets the woman of his dreams, but she marries another.

An inhabitant of an old tenement house lives with hope for her husband's return from the war, which is confirmed by parcels and letters sent to her.

An Computer Animated Short

Through close-ups, the film tries to convey the intense feelings that arise between a boy and a girl at a cafe table.

This celebratory ode to the life of the potato explores the structures and shapes of the root vegetable with a monumental orchestral accompaniment and the help of a dynamic camera. Dazzling rays of sunlight penetrate the wicker incubator and illuminate in backlight the impressive tangle of roots and wrinkled skin of the agricultural crop.

The artwork on trial is Richard Serra's public sculpture, Tilted Arc, commissioned and installed by the U.S. government in 1981. Four years later, a public hearing was held to consider the removal of the sculpture from its site in Federal Plaza in New York City. In documenting the climatic General Services Administration hearing, The Trial Of Tilted Arc is a thought-provoking indictment of the state of the arts. At issue is the validity of a contract between an artist and the government, the freedom of artistic expression, and the "public's" involvement in designing the visual environment. The dialogue/debate between the art community and the bureaucrats has described this site-specific art work in terms ranging from "masterpiece" to "mouse trap."

A documentary by Edgardo Cozarinsky.

Short 8mm film by Hiroyuki Hakamata

This documentary looks at the microchip, an American invention exploited by the Japanese that caused a second industrial revolution. The devastating effect on millions of human lives is related through interviews with some of the newly jobless in Hamilton, Ontario. Using the example of Japan for contrast, host James Laxer demonstrates that the cost of technological advances need not be so high if their effects are foreseen and planned for. Part 2 of the series Reckoning: The Political Economy of Canada.

About how time is reflected in old newsreel footage and in the voice of its narrator, Boris Podnieks.

The Chatila massacre described in the words of Jean Genet (from his text "Quatre heures à Chatila"), accompanied by images and portraits of everyday people.

Short film on the francoist repression.

Matthee reworks a sequence from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) in which a woman dances to the rhythm of jazz and provokes the death of the father.

Quiet Riot - Bang Thy Head

Van Halen "Unleashed" was a documentary produced and aired on MTV first in 1986 and repeatedly through 1987. This is the direct recording from my VHS from the first airing. Van Halen had become Van Hagar. It was fresh. Literally, that's what we called it in the '80s. Play Vice City to hear "fresh" said. Van Hagar was more like Journey or Boston meets Van Halen. It is certainly different than David Lee Roth penned Van Halen. I loved it then, love it now, and again, it's different. Live, the band was having fun playing a lot of covers again, like in the club days. It's interesting comparing these works. In Unleashed Hagar and Van Halen discuss the fact they play a lot of covers live because 5150 was nine songs, there were a couple Hagar songs to be played, a couple old Van Halen songs to play, and time left over to jam.

This film portrait of Ethna Duffy (and myself by implication) summarizes several years between us. It consists of images collected between 1974 and 1980 edited in relation to a soundtrack that consists of an audio landscape of telephonic interruptions as they are interwoven with Ethna's extemporaneous observations, recorded on a telephone answering machine between 1977 and 1978. This film reflects our mutual love and "lunacy" which was often deflected and by inference indirectly located. PW

Spiritual leader is in charge of facing and taming machine through enigmas and magic words. He loses control over her and is destroyed. But the entry of a curious child on the scene brings an unexpected outcome.

Realized in 1985, this film is a Brazilian joint effort in honor of The International Year of Peace, 1986. 30 animators contributed to it, and at that time, those are almost all the Animation artists in Brazil.

A film by F. Kauzon and V. Staroš about Zalgiris' 1986 debut in the European Champions Cup, where they lost in the final to Zagreb Cibona.

100-year-old storyteller Khikmat Rezo who performs Tajik epic-songs, the Gurugli, witnesses and outlives the establishment of Soviet power in Tajikistan.

"Goblin's Chants" is a starkly reductive and hypnotic work, structured around a single charged image. Klaus vom Bruch's torso is inscribed with a rotating computer generated construction (in real: a handmade wooden model put on an ordinary turntable); creating a composite image that metaphorically describes a collapse of the private and public space of vitual media. This spectacle of technology imposed on the human body is accompanied by a haunting soundtrack of traditional songs of the Pygmies. Ultimately, the artist turns his butt onto the viewer, communicating with fundamental body language.

Young Rosa is raped by her stepfather Rosendo. Her mother defends her but the evil man beats her and kills her. However, the girl, full of pain, decides to kill him and flees in terror.

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

A biographical documentary about the actor Long Lance.

A hand-held metal microphone in the Northern part of NSW.

In Newfoundland for the 1986 Sound Symposium Fest, I stayed at the home of Isabelle St. John and Paul Steffler on the Harbor (just below the hill, Signal Tower, where Marconi made the first wireless broadcast back to Europe). Using transducers made from window screens and nylon cord, and amplifying the tall grass and weeds, I shot several cartridges of Super 8 in very windy weather. The last one was shot in a gentle rain and the rainfall 'plucked' the windharps as it fell, while I filmed a fisherman preparing his boat. The middle section of this film was shot in a small fishing village Port Kerwin , about 60 miles south of St. John's, at the studio of artist Don Wright. Here, I amplified pine trees, set up windharps and recorded the gulls overlooking a bay beneath me. This film is dedicated to the memory of Don Wright, his courage and his work as an artist.

A film by Dietmar Brehm

Experimental film by Martha Rudden.

Irit Batsry’s hallucinatory soundtrack and disturbing images create an eerie and all too realistic narrative of destruction and ruin. This is a faked report of an imaginary investigation of an event that never happened. Batsry’s purposeful avoidance of documentary only serves to give her allusions to impending disaster more force. Batsry borrows her images largely from the commercial media; pictures of a sprinter, two Oriental women fending off the camera with their hands, a figure skater; all dissolve and are reconstructed electronically so that their ordinariness and lifeless stillness seem a cover for erotic passions and rapid motion. -lux.org.uk

An award-winning short featuring an interview with actress Colette Haywood of CHAMELEON STREET.

Short film called "Memory and Tribute" (1986) with scenes from the film "The Night of the Pencils" and the testimony of Pablo Díaz.

Magdy travels to Ezbet El Basha in El Borlos to sell the piece of land he inherited and his brothers after his father's death, to discover that the town is controlled by Hajj Radwan, a member of the Socialist Union, who controls its people and persecutes Farida to sell its land to him.

A short film recounting an episode in in the life of Antonin Artaud.

'How many famous Black women can you name who aren't either sportswomen or entertainers?' Mostly the folks of Liverpool draw a blank—making the point that too little is known or taught about Black women.

War and violence against women in videos and on the news.’This short, named after Sylvia Plath’s last poem, is about the woman who is a daughter; icy, perfected and petrified for the patriarchy. She is also a mother drawing her two children with her into this death-in-life. Edge is the irony, which is the poet’s defiance. And it is the blade … how far can those controllers go with their instruments and armaments and still act as though our pieces and feelings can be stuck together again? There is no illusion of the woman’s ‘resistance’. Yet in this theme of woman as medical and war guinea-pig the silent scream becomes audible in lines of poetry and song.