Cinematic Era: 1989 Vintage

A man becomes obsessed with ocular nightmares.

The greatest emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Chen Long, started his campaign against the Muslims who peacefully resided in the Southeast Desert in China. While preparing his magnificent troops, he sent secret agents like Leonard and John to seize the Quran in hope that he could bring Chief Mohammed to submission without a war. Jacky, leader of the Red Flower rebels, which sought to overthrow the Manchurian regime and restore Chinese reign, came to Princess Miriam with his noble character and invincible kung-fu.

Documentary on the history of boxing in New Orleans, Louisiana.

On the 20th anniversary of New York City's gay and lesbian pride movement.

Using powerful imagery, black humour, and a liberal helping of appalling bad taste, the directors set out to draw people's attention to the state of British beaches.

A documentary programme about jewish refugees who settled in Iceland in the 1930's.

A documentary film about the Icelandic politician Jónas Jónsson frá Hriflu.

Thorsteinn Jónsson is a living legend in both the aviation world and the "regular" world. When he flew his last flight in 1988, after 46 years in the air, he was the pilot with the highest amount of flight time in the world: most of it employed in adventurous and dangerous flights. This film follows Thorsteinn in his last flight, and walks down memory lane with him where his sparkling recital, and period footage, tells of his years as a pioneer aviator in Iceland, fighting pilot in the second world war, salvation flights into war-torn Biafra, and numerous other interesting and amusing tales.

On December 7, 1988, a catastrophic earthquake occurred in Armenia that claimed more than 25 thousand lives. The film tells about the first days after the tragedy.

Guédé is an 8-year-old boy. He lives with his family in a hamlet in the Ivorian countryside and is bored. He flees and arrives in town, in Abidjan, where he survives with other “street children”. Then he grows up, becomes an adult and… always dreams of going somewhere else.

Silvia Gruner was born in Mexico City in 1959 to a family of Jewish Holocaust survivors. She studied at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (BA 1982) and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston (MFA 1986). She had her first solo exhibition, Conversaciones con un loto azul, at Thompson Gallery in Boston in 1986. At the time of her graduation and immediately afterward, Gruner made short, often silent films and performances that she recorded using a Super 8 camera. Often through repetitive gestures, her own body served as a vehicle to examine the ways in which the female figure is depicted and to subvert the ways in which the female form is used as a symbolic representation of tradition, values, and national identity. Arena (1986) Desnudos con Alcatraces (1986) Denudo Desciende (1986) El Pecado Orignal Reproducción (1987) Sin Título (1987) EL Parque (1987) Canción Gitana (1987) Cadaver Exquisito (1988) Pregunta (1988) El Vuelo (1989)

A short film by Abdullah Habib, shot in New York City.

Short film.

Short film by George Snow.

A poetic blend of illustration and live animation, which contains elements of self-portraiture and reflects on female desire and identity.

A 74-year-old man stands before the Dresden District Court. After more than forty years, the former highly decorated SS man has been brought to the scene of his crimes. The trial is the cinematic framework in which the background and mechanisms of the social system of nationalism are uncovered by tracing the social development of this SS man.

Tonino De Bernardi was an underground filmmaker from 1967 to 1983.

One of Paik's most compelling and poignant tapes, Living with the Living Theatre pays tribute to Judith Malina and the late Julien Beck, founder of the Living Theatre. Reversing the theme of the earlier Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, which dealt with two artists and their relationships to their fathers, Paik explores Malina and Beck's relationship to their children. Interviews provide the memories of actual lives lived together, while Betsy Connors' animated sequences transcend the specific to suggest the universality of childhood. Garrin and Paik edit these elements into an electronic synthesis that is at times dizzyingly psychedelic and always affectionate towards its subjects. Infused with personal and cultural memories that evoke time and place — Janis Joplin concert footage, Living Theatre performances — Paik creates a haunting and deeply moving homage.

On the motives of the same name story of Tomazo Landolfi.

On the Way Home follows a man on his way home on a rainy night, while cross-cutting the happenings after he returns home: doing laundry in a flooded bathroom, drinking tea, reading, and repeatedly opening and closing the door.

An itinerant drummer boy is visited in his sleep by a beautiful princess. She requests his help in escaping from an evil witch who has entrapped her on the glass mountain. He sets out to find the mountain and is helped on his way by a rather pathetic old giant and a magic butterfly who lends him a pair of wings. Finally, he arrives at his destination and the witch sets him to work on three impossible tasks... The Drummer was one of the winning entries in 'The Magic Mirror' competition to find new animators for children's stories. The main condition was that the stories had to be adapted from existing fairy or folk tales. The series was sponsored by Kelloggs and the series producer was Anne Wood of Ragdoll Productions. Shown on ITV, world wide TV, video and at international animation festivals.

A document of the artist's three-channel audio/video installation of the same title, Dreamkeeper is the second part of Jones' ongoing transcultural dialogue, a commentary on the emerging global African diaspora culture. Here he uses a drum to signify the link among diaspora peoples, stating, "The drum, the sound, is the translator of the unseen, to guide the seeker." Using footage and ambient sounds recorded in Angola and Burkina Faso, he explores what he terms a "narrative structure based on emotional progressions." Dreamkeeper continues Jones' search for images and sounds that speak to African diaspora cultures throughout the world. The drummers and music in the tape are indigenous to Bobo-Diolaso, Burkina Faso, West Africa.

Shot in Burkina Faso, Wassa, which translates “come out and play”in Wolof, is a transcultural music video that unfolds with lush imagery and the evocative music of Moustapha Thiombiano. Jones creates a dreamlike vision, capturing the vibrancy and sensuality of the everyday. This rhythmically textured work is part of his exploration of African diaspora culture through nonverbal storytelling and a transcultural language of sound and image construction — the development of codes based on what Jones terms "emotional progressions and an African sensorium."

A posthumous portrait of the author Kurt Tuscholsky's life in exile in Sweden during the interwar period.

"The intention of Talk, Kids was to videograph the conversations of four young children during an entire day in the country, and then choose the most memorable events for the final edit. In reviewing the footage afterwards, we discovered that the most memorable events were the interactions of the children with the off-camera adults. We therefore put together a tape that illustrates children's fragile and often stubborn re-interpretation of what adults expect of them. The tape is embroidered with vignettes (filmed on Super-8 as home-movies) of the same children at play." -B.A.

Canudos is a controversial topic that has always been excluded from Brazil's official history. This video does not attempt to exhaustively cover such a significant episode, which has been interpreted in so many different and contradictory ways. República de Canudos narrates the trajectory of the liberation struggle of organized communities in the hinterlands of Bahia and brings to light the memory of Antônio Conselheiro, who survives unscathed in everyday life, in fantasy, or even in the utopia of the communities of Uauá, Euclides da Cunha, Cocorobó, Tucano, and Monte Santo.

The first short film by Chinese sixth generation filmmaker Hu Xueyang.

"blind spot: term for a currently not reachable or visible space."

Film For... is a collage of camera original footage, educational film and other amusing snippets of found footage, interlocked with dialogues and statements (some from the found footage itself), documenting gender politics and the lack of substantial change inspite of our perceptions to the contrary.

A man tries to hitchhike a ride by holding paper money in his hand.

This puppet animation is set in a time when darkness still reigned when people were still afraid of what lay beyond the stillness of the night. In the evening, a husband leaves the house with a guilty look on his face, and his wife, feeling something, gently sends him off. The wife notices a shadow on the shoji and chases after it, but what she sees are the creatures of the underworld... The house and the townscape are so elaborate and emotional that we forget that they are models. The house and the town are so elaborate and emotionally rich that we forget that they are models, and the dolls, moving with an awkward rhythm, play out the drama of a mysterious and violent woman in a gentle manner.

It seems that pure love is a very painful thing these days. Yoshio is lured into a dubious club by Keiko, whom he falls in love with at first sight on campus. His premonition is correct, the club is a prostitution ring and Keiko is the number one girl there. Yoshio is confronted by one fierce opponent after another. It's easy to like a hero who gets beaten up and then gets back up again. It is worth mentioning that the action scenes are very powerful and full of stunts.

The third film in the Death Faces series

"A monster, a hideous half-man, half-sheep mutation whose hypnotic powers are so intense that he lures you out onto the tracks and into his eyes...." Such are the stories that have captured the imaginations of Louisville teenagers for three generations. Stories that have lured youths to the Pope Lick trestle in search of a dare, a thrill, a place to drink, an opportunity to scare a date or a friend. A legend kept alive only by word of mouth - confirmed by the excitable and credulous minds of adolescents and emphasized by the ominous presence of 100-foot railroad trestle. One crisp, October evening finds Clancy, Ben and Katie on a quest - for excitement, for beer, for danger and a rendezvous with...the Sheepman!

A Still image film, narrated by Ghazi Rabihavi.

The private diary of a couple in a ghostly Budapest before, during and after the Second World War, between poetry and historical re-enactment.

When people from different generations meet in Montevideo to remember their years of exile in Mexico and Europe due to the military dictatorship, they realize that Uruguay is not the same country they had to leave.

Somewhere in an unknown land of turtles, an old turtle wants to see the world. After hearing a cancan record she wants to dance and decides to take a ship to Europe - to Paris. Once there, she learns how to do the cancan, wears sequinned dresses, stiletto-heeled shoes and net stockings. She loses these wonderful things on her journey home but she still has her memories and the zest for life.

Live performance by techno pioneer Adamski at Brixton Academy London in 1989

On Tomb Sweeping Day, in 1988, a film crew set out for the monument of the Tangshan earthquake to shoot a memorial ceremony for the victims. This marked the beginning of shooting for a documentary called "The Great Earthquake." The crew continued to shoot through the rest of 1988, even staging a large-scale rock 'n' roll concert and performance art event on the Great Wall, and into 1989, including footage shot at the famous 1989 Avant-Garde Art Exhibition, where one artist fired two gun shots at her exhibit. More footage was shot during the Tiananmen protests, up until the events of June 4th shut down production for good. Shortly before, a two-hour "rough cut" was assembled by main director Wen Pulin and Assistant Director Hao Zhiqiang, which screened only once (and is preserved at University libraries in the U.S.). The footage has been recycled in some of Wen's later films, notably "China Action," but "The Great Earthquake" itself was never finished.

At the change of seasons, Planty comes to life. He is attacked by a bumble bee.

A meditation on the death of a male body, calling into question language, memory and theoretical texts.

Over the years, Betti Alver rejected all attempts at capturing her personality, but the poet's poems remain. Respecting the beliefs of the poet, the authors of the film Paul-Eerik Rummo and Vallo Kepp focuse on his world of poetry.

Super 8mm. Colour. Sound.

Dinner forks violate a corridor and room, stabbing vicious wounds in the architectural structures. The attack results in the symbolic death of the space.

The desperate fight between police and an international gold smuggling group.

Follow the Union Pacific 8444 from Cheyenne to Los Angeles. Then the 8444 and the Southern Pacific 4449 head up Cajon Pass side by side in a spectacular show of steam at its finest.

Every interior has an exterior. Every exposure is exhibition. My interior/exterior-consumed! Each cadre has a blatant lack of orientation. All questions remain unanswered.