Cinematic Era: 1988 Vintage

Experimental animated dance film

"What seems to be a boring tape about learning computers is a truly amazing fever dream involving a woman on the verge of a complete mental breakdown when she realized she'll have to learn computers for her job. What follows in her decent into madness, including systematic patriarchy, literal fever dreams, black box theater, Microsoft Paint-esque graphics, hallucinations, horror movie music, bad acting, mirror work, vintage brooches, attempts at humor, and meeting the ghost of 19th century computer programmer Ava Lovelace..."

Student film from Eiki Takahashi. Video art work about American writer William Burroughs. Affected by the cut-up / fold-in method, which involves chopping up existing texts to expose potentially hidden malicious intent in the texts. Using the text and narrative of Burroughs, he tried to reconstruct the language space of Burroughs by using 8mm video, photographs, and re-shooting them.

John Huston and the Dubliners is a valentine to the late director and a relatively standard production film about his making of The Dead. Much time is devoted to the actors' understandably admiring comments about Mr. Huston, and to the disposition of the prop department's fake snow. The film has the potential to seem ordinary, but it becomes touched with magic whenever the director makes his presence felt. Mr. Huston displays his characteristic gallantry and his keen attention to seemingly unimportant touches ("Don't worry about what you say, just keep talking," he tells one actor, and gives precise instructions for reading the line "Would you please pass the celery?"). He describes The Dead as "lacework," and this film makes the aptness of that description very clear.

"Davis's earlier explorations of the body and sensuality come to fruition in this, her latest film. Through rigorous cross-cutting and use of extreme close-ups, manmade and natural manifestations of architecture merge with the physical body into palpable delineations of form and function." – San Francisco Cinematheque program notes

Lita Ford, live in Essen, Germany

Mexican feature film

A day in the life of a lone robot, the aptly-named Polly Gone.

Brief portrait of several construction sites.

A greedy landlord wants to evict a bicycle shop from his property and replace it with a high-rent-paying art gallery. The environment-conscious owner of the bike shop outwits the avaricious landlord in a high-speed bike chase.

Karl Gass compiles film material to document the Pogromnacht in 1938.

Two drug traffickers, ambivalent about their lifestyle, start a chain of events that turns into a bloodbath.

Film made for the filmaker's almanach, a project of Owen O'Toole. Film based on the progress/unrolling of a (typical) day in my life from the early hour of the morning. Full of the daily errands to the evening on my way to work in the suburbs of Paris.

A teen runaway hits the streets of New York City.

Camel Trophy 1988 features the wild and seldom, if ever, traversed terrain of the Indonesian isle of Sulawesi. This unforgiving landscape provided the perfect challenge for man and machine, thankfully captured for you to enjoy, over and over again.

A canvas is covered with a conversion filter for camera light (85ND3). Trbuljak has previously experimented with painting without a brush – here, he brings the colour in front of and no longer on the canvas using a material actually intended for camera techniques.

In Warren Sonbert's Honor and Obey soldiers march in formation, a tiger stalks through the snow, religious processions wind through the streets, and palm trees wave in a tropical breeze. As brightly colored images of authority figures blend into scenes of cocktail parties, this 21-minute silent film flows along with the grace of a musical score built on complex tensions hidden among the notes. "Whose authority will you obey?" the film seems to ask, as it deftly avoids simple-minded juxtapositions. Instead, we see a melange of images so full of geography (Notre Dame Cathedral, the Sydney Opera House, Fifth Avenue), that the work mocks the idea of any specific setting. -- Caryn James, The New York Times. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, in 1998.

A drug addict escapes his misery one night by reliving the founding of Rome and imagining himself the Emperor.

It's March 26, 1988 at the Hammersmith Odeon, London... yes, it's Magnum in action. Once more set to stun, amaze and tantalise with their unique stance of high octane, melodic rock music. The lights dim, the curtain rises and the crowd roars, prepare yourselves... here come the troops. The songs stand tall, proud and invincible, some brand new material aired along-side many much-loved classics. Just wait and see what wonders Magnum have got in store for you.

The last-known remaining video in this series, aired only on the Playboy Channel in July 1988, including Playmate host Emily Arth, a story on the dancers of the Crazy Horse Saloon, a parody commercial, a story on the pictorial of Jessica Hahn, a preview of the search for the 35th Anniversary Playmate, a Playmate video shot in Cancun (featuring Cathy St. George, Teri Weigel, & Rebekka Armstrong), a repeat of the Marilyn Monroe segment from Playboy Video Magazine 12, a parody commercial, a softcore segment featuring Playmate Cindy Brooks, and the Perfect Playmate Profile of Emily Arth. There were two other known, but lost, Playboy Video Magazines not released to VHS, one hosted by Eloise Broady & the other by Susie Owens, but very little is known about these episodes, other than brief promos aired on Playboy at Night.

The first filmed ascent of Mount Eiger.

Created during the club’s autumn training camp, this film is a polished comedy that is completely different in tone from director Suto’s previous work, Summer Day. Its carefully crafted screenplay, direction, and sound effects come together to create a straightforwardly entertaining and highly enjoyable film.

Animated segment for Spanish lesson on Soviet television.

8mm film by Yosuke Okawado.

Short film.

Azian wants to set a car on fire and film it for a project. To do so, she navigates a web of application processes and increasingly comical phone calls.

A series of metamorphosing images criticise a society in which dulled minds feed on tabloid scandal. Focuses on the 'shapeless workers fuelling the fires with the bodies of their own kind'. As the workers seek sexual release, the muddy pictures give way to line drawings of the erotic landscape: curves, valleys and mounds becoming the sexual act itself, are whipped up into a charcoal frenzy of chaotic abstract images of frustration. The end brings release and a return to calm.

About how dolphins saved children who couldn't swim.

About an unfaithful husband and a faithful wife.

"State of the Art of Computer Animation" is a Pacific Arts compilation video of several 1980s examples of computer animation.

About life in the village of Verkola, the birthplace of the great Russian writer Fyodor Abramov, to whose memory the painting is dedicated. The northern Arkhangelsk region where the writer Fyodor Abramov grew up. Portraits of the writer's fellow countrymen, residents of the village of Verkola, their lives, work, and daily life.

The poem "Der Anachronistische Zug oder Freiheit und Democracy" (The Anachronistic Train, or Freedom and Democracy), written by Berthold Brecht in 1947, forms the basis for the campaign launched on the occasion of the 1980 federal elections under the slogan "Brecht statt Strauß" (Brecht instead of Strauß): a journey across the entire Federal Republic.

Two villages are to fall victim to the port expansion: Altenwerder and Moorburg. From idyll to horror, the flushing sand is having a frightening effect.

Two women in Hamburg traffic. The other road users help the two ladies in their artistic endeavors. However, they soon come to regret it. But what wouldn't you do for art?

How much does it cost to enjoy a full bath at an altitude of 1,500 meters in a mountain village without electricity or running water?

If Robert Langer had actually lived, he would have become an actor, but ultimately would not have gotten any work. He would have been involved in the much-publicized "Heino Blesser scandal" at the time, and his career would have been over. That would have been the end of it. If he had lived, people today would refer to him as a failure.

"Imagine the war is over, and I can't leave." So says Salta, the soldier who stepped on a mine in some war. "Evil Mine" describes the period between misstep and death. And a few miracles that Salta experiences on the path to forgetting, which leads through memory.

A documentary regarding Father Charles Coughlin

A Black farming family struggles to find its identity and maintain its integrity when the younger of two brothers decides to sell his part of the farm and go to law school. This goes against what the older brother values in life. The older brother's wife acts as reconciler between the two brothers.

Chaos ensues as the Harte and Pycio clans unite in an 80s London wedding.

A nostalgic, sweet and cruel nightmare creeping up on a maiden's prayer, psychiatric treatment, and the eventual arrival of death. An image video with these keywords. The title comes from the song "Godstar" by Psychic TV. Produced by students advancing to the major course.

Chaos ensues when a girl escapes from the Land of Paintings and forgets the spell to return the painting to its original state.

Fanad Head is a remote light house in North-West Ireland. This short documentary inspects the light house installations and service supply delivered by a helicopter even in bad wheather conditions.

A fast railway and motorcar travel from West-Berlin to the south coast of Portugal called "Algarve".

Film by Nikkatsu.

A film about collective memory and metamorphosis, Nine Lives offers a series of vignettes centred on a tarot reading. The film journeys through images of women – as witches, goddesses, artists and more – always in relation to that mythical female familiar, the cat.

Egypt, the cradle of history and culture traces its beginning to life developed along the banks of the Nile.

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City landmark, the Brooklyn Bridge. Emphasizing its strength and beauty, Jonas locates the bridge as an iconic site in this meditative, cryptic study of identity and place. In Brooklyn Bridge, the transformative power of video is used to infuse the static photographs and naturalistic footage of the bridge with a mythic, animistic force, which is heightened by the artist's emblematic inscription of self onto the site.

After a few years of separation, a young Russian girl, Olga, comes to New York to reunite with her boyfriend, Sasha, who defected from his ballroom dance team at the International competition.

Fast food versus food culture. In the form of a documentary grotesque, the stylized, rationalized, and industrialized triumph of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and others around the world is portrayed.