Cinematic Era: 1987 Vintage

Composed of 8 separate film sketches recorded in New York's Central Park: Bikes, Volleyball, Soccer, Runners, Boats, Basketball, Baseball and Roller-skating. LIGHTPLAY is about the delight of watching people at play. While the viewer's attention shifts to follow movement, measure rhythms, notice idiosyncratic gestures or listen to the layered sounds of the park, we discover that there is more to being a spectator than meets the eye. Below the surface of textured images, diverse tempos and different, if not polar, visual qualities, we encounter a design that mimics the dynamic and constructive nature of looking and listening. LIGHTPLAY becomes a film about the art of seeing.

A beautiful woman, a mysterious man, a lipstick. An experiment with two solutions.

Today is Sunday is both a still life and a landscape film in which the characters are described by nature. The clouds, the wind, the waves, articulate their presence. A dialogue is established between the external environment, the sound, the weather, and the internal musings of the female character.

A short film by Ahmed Zir.

Slime Face wanders through a barren landscape, until-- Suddenly, it's not barren anymore. Slime Face experiences visions of crystals. Music by Jud Ehrbar of Space Needle and Reservoir.

Sulfur dioxide and acidic precipitation have added stress to the forest ecosystem and is the unofficial cause of the decline of the Sugar Maple. This is the lamentation of a world slipping away. A farm here, a person there.

An amazing visual experience that takes the viewer from the ice-strewn waters of the hostile Antarctic to the coral-colored streams of the Caribbean, featuring the film of the Emmy-winning underwater cinematographer Al Giddings.

RAINHAM, ESSEX, UK, 1987. Bow Gamelan Ensemble (Paul Burwell, Anne Bean and Richard Wilson) were invited to make a piece specifically for television by 'Alter Image' (Channel 4). They chose to work with the concrete barges near Rainham where they had previously explored sound on several of their many river trips into the estuary, recognising the huge differences in sound from low to high tide. They were filmed for over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed capturing the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and the ways one could harness this power to shift and shape sound. As the huge resonant chambers of the barges filled up, they deepened the sounds of the metal reinforcing bars sticking out as they were played with sticks and beaters. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan’s own array of foghorns, sirens and hooters.

A review of the artists' works, lives and coexistence with the people of Aswan who are busy with their lives and their own celebrations.

Super 8mm. Colour. Silent with tape, and with in-person performance.

Man Oh Man takes a loving, curious look at the forces which mold young boys into men. Men from all walks of life speak with humor and sadness about what is expected of them. This film explores personal definitions of masculinity, inter-gender communications, self-worth, gender stereotyping, and changing roles. As an honest representation of one filmmaker's glimpse into the male world, it is guaranteed to spark audience interest and stimulate discussion.

This program covers the history and recent authentic reconstruction of James Anderson's blacksmith shop from 18th century Williamsburg, Virginia, showing the construction methods and materials of the 18th century used in constructing the blacksmith shop.

With "Presidential Bid" Andrews asks questions about how power is acquired, and how this relates to class and race in the United States during the late 1980s. It asks these questions indirectly, as everything the artist actually says in the video is a statement. The conceptual and political energy of the piece exists between these firm statements and implied questions.

Compilation of cartoons about the character of the "Mighty Mouse".

A young black recruit is shown the world open to him as a Navy officer

The story of Merlín in an experimental manner.

Aaron Siskind is most remembered for his imaginative photography of two-dimensional surfaces. This film surveys Siskind's work over half a century, from his social documentaries of the 1930s to the forms and abstract imagery of found objects, stone walls, and graffiti of ensuing decades.

Collaborating with choreographer Elizabeth Streb, Lucier constructs a suite of dances in which the human figure is abstracted and isolated within a natural landscape. Structured in three segments, the work suggests the evolution of a mythical being moving from a black void to a natural landscape, and then into an aerial world. Fragmenting and isolating the physical body in space, or in relation to simple elements of landscape, Lucier evokes themes of confinement, the struggle to defy gravity, and a metaphorical desire for transcendence.

A visually arresting film, concentrates on the native art of the Ojibwa tribe. Much Ojibwa history and philosophy has been related through the rock carvings and paintings which are featured throughout this work. The voices of the Elders are heard in the film, describing the tales of creation and existence that mark the group's iconography. A sense of mystery informs this evocative film as the realization strikes that no individual can expect to penetrate the mythos of the Ojibwa.

A white deck chair, a large fan, a bonsai, combs of mother-of-pearl, a decapitated head carved out of wood, long hat pins to pierce its eyes and tongue and for adorning the hair, a red dressing gown, a white silk nightdress. Through the justification of the biblical story of Judith, the performance explores the theme of violence and vulnerability, plunging into an ocean of luminous and murderous eroticism.

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

A film by Albert Gabriel Nigrin

Photographed in East Sommerville, MA. An empty lot piled with garbage and remnants of the past lives of its nearby residents cut in with the brave laundry of a preset set of inhabitants next door, the children of whom roam through this claustrophobic making their own private sense of it all.

A film by Peter Herwitz

Here, an isolated and surrounded being tries, by arrhythmic movements, to contain a convulsive fear of light. Three stages, three moments, but one and the same creature oscillating between the human and the insect which remains secretly within its own “camera obscura”.

Shot entirely using a Steadicam. A video version of a dance piece by the Karen Jamieson Dance Company.

QUICK OPENER is a short comedy. A baseball movie for the initiated, it includes references to Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, Dock Ellis and the legendary 1960 Pirates versus Yankees World Series. Bruno Sammartino also gets a mention, but my after-the-fact research indicates that Bruno was a professional wrestler and not a baseball player. There are so many details to keep track of in making a film. Anyway, this film also contains the world's longest baseball joke.

Black health care professionals discuss AIDS causes, offer advice on safe sex and IV drug use in this video for black individuals.

Docudrama about an esoteric ancient belief system based on dualistic interpretation of Christianity

Steps with shadows. An arm shadow in the landscape - concrete/grass/flowers. Flicker and a finger morphs into abstraction. A real hand appears above the animation, a zoom - drawings/hands/feet.

"Enas," or Αἰνείας – the Greek word for "being one" – is interpreted in this ballet, which represents Marcia Haydée's first free choreography. Music by Vangelis Papathanassiou.

Kostas Tsakonas is Thomas Rezilikis, a professional unemployed pontiac with a strange habit.

"Optical printing links East with West within a mosaic of looped, layered and shifting images filmed originally on Super 8 while on a (train/car/thumb) trip across Europe in 1978. Swinging cow udders, woman sweeping, farm woman walking, nuns chanting, Nude Descending, voices in a bread shop, Dachau and other artworks from Documenta 7, riding the escalator of the Centre Pompidou, etc. are layered in overlapping, shifting, and repetitive frame-clusters pulled from Super 8 footage filmed on a trip that began in Bucharest and ended in Paris. Disparate elements are combined and manipulated to construct a lyrical work about walking, history, and memory." - Holly Fisher

Short film. Plot to be added.

A documentary about the 1967 Sexual Offences Act in England, which decriminalized homosexuality between consenting males over the age of 21.

An independent experimental short from the GDR.