Cinematic Era: 1988 Vintage

A portrait of Vienna in the "year of rememberance" 1988 (50 years after the "Anschluss"). A cinematographic approach to the history and obsessions of this town. A glance under the skin of everyday life, searching for the open sores in the soul of this would-be metropolis. The objects found: The old lady, listening through the wall. A peepshow for catholics. The making of a planned child. A song for Kurt Waldheim. Fishes from the Danube crashing against kitchenwalls. The torture of playing the zither, etc. A personal statement on my hometown, a work close to the traditions of Austrian experimental film. A coughing up and spitting out. (J.R.)

Titles for a Channel 4 project that didn't get aired. Released later on YouTube.

Rabbi Löw was not only a prominent Kabbalist and alchemist of seventeenth century Prague but also a prophet of new visual media and cybernetics. Bielický’s video composition evokes a world seen through the eyes of Kabbalah. Flowing water merging with television static symbolizes the process of birth, movement, deviation, and the passage of time.

I am now going to experience a possible birth, - the procedure of which can obviously vary.

A surreal look at the conformity that prevails within institutions. The videotape moves the viewer through the situations found in a mental health institution and conveys how our lives are molded by a particular structure that has almost no interest in individuality or personality.

In this film, Róza Berger-Fiedler traces the history of the Jews in Berlin from the Middle Ages to the present day and connects it with his own biography.

Nakayama is a university student living an uneventful life in a manga club. Aya, a younger student, secretly has feelings for him, but Nakayama's feelings for Akiko Taniguchi, a classmate, and Fujima, a senior student, like Aya. Aya has secret feelings for him, but Nakayama has feelings for Akiko Taniguchi, a classmate, and Fujima, a senior, has feelings for Aya. These emotions intertwine, a casual human drama unfolds, and finally, the seasons shift. The story unfolds in an unhurried manner, without many ups and downs, but with a deep insight into the temperament of modern university students. The tasteful dialogue between the man and the woman is outstanding.

An omnibus made up of three stories featuring the characters "Man A and Man B", "Woman A and Woman B" and "Man A and Woman A". What happens when two people with completely different personalities are brought together? Something seems to happen, but in the end nothing happens. This film looks at the subtle twists and turns of communication between people from a pure perspective. The characters of the actors are hard to ignore.

A Pashtun villager boy visits Kabul for the first time ever.

Twenty toilets, a urinal and four ladies who work in the public toilet at Sergels Torg in Stockholm. They are the ones who make sure that the facilities are clean and that there's toilet paper. They also watch over drug users.

A love triangle between three very different people. Has interjections of anime, a child sized mannequin, and lots of strange goings on throughout. Hard to pinpoint exactly what it's all about.

The documentary reports on the most important stages of Thomas Müntzer's life, from his birthplace in Stolberg to his place of death in the Heldrungen fortress. The film looks at the preacher, his fight against social grievances, the German Peasants' War, the preservation of monuments in the GDR and Müntzer's legacy today.

20.03.1988

Considered the father of video art in China, Zhang Peili has been producing incisive, internationally acclaimed works since the 1980s, building a career that ushered in and encompasses the entire history of Chinese video art. Keenly critical of his country’s authoritarian leadership, he sees his work as a form of protest revealing the forces shaping Chinese society and the lives of its citizens. Inspired by the endurance-testing videos of artists like Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman, Zhang uses mundane, repetitive actions and scenes to demonstrate the absurdity and destructiveness of ritualized behavior and social norms. 30 x 30 (1988), his first video work, is an intentionally excruciating three-hour loop of a pair of gloved hands shattering a mirror, then piecing it back together—an acerbic critique of the rage for watching television, yet another form of thought-control in China.

The documentary focused on the daily lives of the African-Caribbean community who lived on the notorious Broadwater Farm Estate, in Tottenham, North London. In 1985 riots erupted on the estate in response to the death of local resident, mother Cynthia Jarrett, after the police raided her home.

Shot on Sanday, one of the Orkney islands, the film is in four sections, each representing (and transforming) the filmmaker's actions in and experience of a place at a particular time. Drawing on the qualities of these places and the long history of human habitation of the landscape (evidence for which goes back to 3500 BC), Nick Collins' intention was to make possible the experience of a series of linked mental/emotional states, seen through a landscape and movement within it.

On his final “in-country” mission, Sgt Buddy Douglas as well as the rest of his LRRP team are coming back from their last patrol once they receive requests to check off a possible V.C. sniper.

A painterly, poetic experimental film with narrative elements. A woman is looking after an obviously blind man. She undresses, bandages and dresses him again. Since the action takes place on two temporal planes running in opposite directions, the couple's relationship appears to be in a state of stagnation. In-between, we are shown the images in the protagonists' minds: nightmares, an optical machine, but also erotic dreams from perhaps better days. Tango motifs and an aria (composed by Anthony Moore) reinforce the impression of a romantic chamber piece. The man's blindness refers to the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, who destroyed his sight through keeping his naked eye fixed too long on the sun while researching into the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina. The pictorial technique, with layer after layer dissolving into one another, is reminiscent of the overpainting technique deployed by the director in her work for the canvas.

A deeply religious family's dinner turns hostile after uncomfortable notions are raised.

With minimal tools and the limitation of a single image of a woman’s head a set of pearls activates a woman’s inner drive expressing freedom of movement. Animation suggests quickly a series of possible choices. The decision is ultimately hers. An animation exploring metamorphosis accompanied with music by Meredith Monk.

At the age of twelve Helena Valero was kidnapped by the Yanomami Indians, with whom she spent 24 years in Brazil's Oneroque Basin. Upon returning to her own people in Manaus, she was rejected because of her children's mixed blood.

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

Mexican feature film

an experiment made using footage of a western. The film is extremely damaged and degraded, rendering it a mainly textural experience. The short is mainly a warm yellow, punctuated occasionally with blue.

Found footage experiment using a war movie.

A film by Alan Sondheim

Tamás Almási's second documentary about the closing factories of Ózd.

A video by Leslie Singer

Read by actors Michael Gough, Edward Fox, and Eileen Atkins, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land expresses the disillusionment and disgust of the post–World War I era in Europe. In this documentary, professor Frank Kermode, biographer Peter Ackroyd, and poets Sir Stephen Spender and Craig Raine examine the complex nature of Eliot’s influential poem, analyze its appeal, and trace the reasons why it became one of the best-known emblems of the 20th century.

A portrait of inspirational jazz drummer and teacher Art Blakey with Dizzy Gillespie, many pupils including Wayne Shorter, the Marsalis brothers, and a surprising new generation of musicians and dancers.

Now the summer holidays have finally arrived. Marco (Tobias Blume) and Tobi (René Hahn) have forged ahead many plans, which are from their point of view, the entire eight weeks vacation according to varied and form under boys. But then comes the "bad" news: Marco should drive for a time in a summer camp in the Erzgebirge. What about the beautiful plans of the two?

A moving short portrait of Karl Marx’s family and their living conditions during their time in London.

In the 17th century, the rich butcher Corentin plans to marry the beautiful Clémence, but the wedding was not consummated because of a storm which made Corentin impotent.

Born to be Sold is Paper Tiger Television and Rosler's acerbic and witty interpretation of the notorious "Baby M" case, in which a natural — "surrogate" — mother and father of a baby fought each other for custody of the child. Rosler assumes various roles of the participants in the controversy, from the baby to the sperm, from the lawyer to the judge, as well as the two women in the case. Reconstructing the story from its trial by media and the court transcripts, Rosler views "surrogate" mother Mary Beth Whitehead's actions as an attempt to defy the identity assigned by her class and gender, and sees the verdict favoring the Sterns as an endorsement of the father's phallic right, his jurisprudential entitlement. Her analysis demonstrates how political, class and ideological systems are played out on the body of the woman.

A movie trailer for a non-existent Bond-style spy thriller "coming soon to a mini-mall cineplex near you!" Featuring John Sex, Hapi Phace, Laura Levine, Dany Johnson and The French Twist.

While knitting, two women recall moments from their lives--memories of their neighbours, husbands, mothers, and of other women knitting.

This 16 minute video provides for you an opportunity to share with children important messages about fire safety.

Attempting to apologize for the lack of good weather in Weather Diary 3, George arrives in Milwaukee only to find the drought back in full swing. Since there’s not enough good weather, the tape becomes a social diary against the backdrop of the Motivation Of The Carcasoids project.

. . . Just Names . . . Just Names

Documentary about a place in Canada above the tree line.

The only complete Leonard Cohen concert broadcast on television. It was aired on May 20, 1988, on TVE. The musicians: Leonard Cohen, vocals, guitar, keyboard. John Bilezikjian, lute. Bob Furgo, keyboard and violin. Tom McMorran, keyboards. Steve Meador, drums. Bob Metzger, guitar, steel guitar. Steve Zirkel, bass, keyboard, trumpet. Perla Batalla, backing vocals. Julie Christensen, backing vocals.

The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.

A trainee truck-driver makes his first foreign trip with an experienced co-driver, whose self-confidence sometimes makes him careless. A road accident gives the youth a nightmare that threatens to become reality.

The film reflects a transformation which results in its destruction.

On the changes from one city to another: from New York to San Juan. The images condense metaphors of displacement, of the out of place, and of accommodating to ambivalent spaces, through scenes animated by lights and frames with changing color filters.