Cinematic Era: 1998 Vintage

A saint in the city.

MTV's "Toonumentary," a documentary of MTV's foray into animation and the formation of MTV Animation, was shown in 1998. Several of MTV's well-known animation series were featured, including Aeon Flux, MTV Oddities, Beavis and Butt-head... and, of course, Daria.

A documentary on the Day of the Dead tradition, focusing on its acceptance in the San Francisco Bay Area

At the end of the 20th Century, a deadly virus is set loose in England, it reanimates the dead after the hosted dies, can anyone survive.

A history of zombies

Work based on language, where Ventura shows didactic videos that present a futuristic and post-revolutionary manual of etiquette.

The film was shot over four years. A woman — from Hui'an, Fujian province — finds out that her husband has become infected with a venereal disease. She takes out her revenge on the local hotel and the barber shop (which are known as sites of secret prostitution in the city) by setting four explosives. Da Yi's film tries to understand why a kind, virtuous wife and mother turns to this extreme act.

The vacant lot understood as the irruption in an ordered system of a dissonance (...) The d added to the wasteground - correct term - constitutes a kind of neologism which could be translated by “a devastated, damaged ground, even before d 'have served'! This is where the idea of ​​destruction is translated... by war, disease, etc.

This feature documentary paints an engaging portrait of Oumar, an auto mechanic from Burkina Faso. Always ready to lend a helping hand, Oumar has become a vital, central part of his community, in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. People tend to gather round as he works, and talk often turns to weighty issues: feminism, polygamy, politics, religion. In eight months’ time, he is due to return for a visit with his family after six years away, so he is searching for hundreds of presents to take with him. Back home, when you leave the nest, it’s to look for wealth. Otherwise, failure awaits…

A darkly comic musical about the mystery of death, communication of spirits, and the redemption that comes from knowing the truth. A violent father returns to Earth and wanders the streets in a child's wagon, searching for clues to the cause of his death through his daughter, a homicide detective. When the two finally collide on a downtown street late one night, they are transported to another dimension. The two communicate through dance and music, finally unraveling the cause of their separation and grief.

On a trip to Hong Kong, Ho Tam was cruised by an attractive young man at the airport. He was in the police force and also knew how to play a Chinese instrument (and play it well). He was a child prodigy who had performed around the world, but now made his living as both a businessman and a policeman (part-time). Ho Tam asked for a performance.

"Mama, Papa, last night I had an ugly dream which sent shivers down my spine..." Cine terror wrecked my eyes with images that lurk. The thief with his face against the cold wall murmurs in riddles and weeps for peace as Mario spins. Off loading trauma from having been glassed after the first public screening of CLING FILM in Britain, Franko's art assemblages, scars, tattoos, broken glass and blood red crosses in his flat translate into bad bad dreams as life/art footage cross cuts with indelible images of Oedipus Re, Mario spinning, a man with dark wavy hair and stubble crying, WWII stereoscopes of bombed French or German cities; negative/positive flashback images of blindness...

When Kodak developed the Super 8 films, the reels were mailed back to the author. At the bottom of the stamped cover, a drop of a few photograms, foreign to the reel, was there. Cornu kept these caps containing images of films from other users and compiled them into the film

A fable concerning the landscape and the romanticism of travel—featuring Starved Rock State Park and other familiar American scenes depicted in vintage postcards—that also reveals the price we pay for the open road.

June 6, 1944 and the greatest armada in military history is assembled in England for an assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe. For this long awaited D-Day the Allies have assembled 12,000 planes to protect a surface force of 4,000 ships. Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower has nearly 3,000,000 men trained for the assault. Combat cameramen made a great pictorial record of this day - a day that changed the course of history.

Santos bases his self-described "video letter from Hong Kong" on the ambiguity of the word "frame." He refers to the picture or camera frame, as well as to the variable frame rate of digitally manipulated video, and, finally, to the act of framing as a process by which one names, describes, and in some sense colonizes, the object of perception. Images of transit — commuters, buses, boats, subways — stop and start, run backward, and flutter across the screen, yielding brief glimpses of a face or a gesture, as if they are being scanned for meaning. Indeed, by directly addressing the viewer through flashes of text ("Have you ever been framed?"), Santos suggests the colonial history that haunts everyday life in modern Hong Kong.

Suzannah's life at the mercy of two elder's lust, meting out justice Suzannah's picture, centered differently is fragmented on various media (her legs being filmed under the water, her face sinking in and her body being framed in a TV set). The picture appears intermittently within the two elder's scope of vision. The device turns the spectators and the two old men into expectant voyeurs. The spoken text is taken from the Book of Daniel (Old Testament).The slides are enlarged reproductions of Lotharius's crystal (IXth century) illustrating Suzannah's life.

During WWII, a group of black soldiers return from Italy only to be treated poorly by white MPs guarding a group of nazis POW in a small southern town

With Salt Creek, Seoungho Cho turns his hypnotic camera eye on the harsh terrain of Death Valley. Through a series of delicate formal manipulations, he folds representations of a coldly beautiful landscape into images of seething video static, water sluicing out of a tap, and a surveillance view from one office tower into another. Stephen Vitiello's score echoes the image track in describing a gradual arc of inhospitable elegance, rhythmic grace, and decay.

Video art by Jessie Shefrin

Does colour exist where there is no light? The garden is a setting for colour research: random objects are laid out in changing combinations for repeated shooting and printing with varying exposure densities and colour balances. Images of Corinne standing and sleeping in a chair evoke traditional portraits in garden settings, but here the figure’s subjected to severe colour and contrast changes, and is partly obliterated by moving windblown foliage shadows in primary colours. There’s constant shifting between brief monochromes, duochromes and full colour, intercut with fragments of stark black and white negative from the original separations which contrast with the strong colours. In some of the sequences there’s a solidity of blackness, as in the background to a hibiscus flower, which seems to have a depth like thick velvet -in reality this blackness is the garden background with insufficient light to register on the high-contrast black and white negative.

A 35 mm. experimental film.

Planet Earth teems with life. However, not all of the world is particularly friendly to its inhabitants for this is also a planet of extremes: blistering deserts, barren mountain peaks, bleak icy wastelands and dark places that rarely see the sun. In the freezing world of the Arctic, the polar bear is equipped with a coat of fur and blubber designed to cope in a land where winters seem interminable. High altitude mountain ranges also present problems for animals. Mountain goats need to cope with the thin air and treacherous terrain found above the snow line. Life in the desert is a constant battle against a lack of water. The saguaro cactus can expand sufficiently to absorb a ton of water a day when the rains come. In the deepest, darkest caves, freetail bats have developed extraordinarily sensitive hearing. Finally, in the mysterious deep of our oceans, fragile jellyfish are gelatinous enough to thrive in water pressure that would crush most creatures.

Director Neil Goldberg asks his parents to read dreams out loud into the camera.

8mm film by Maeda Toshiyuki

Examining his double life as both curator and photographer, a career he abandoned and recently returned to with the publication of Mr. Bristol's Barn, this is a documentary on the man who helped establish photography for the first time as a true and different kind of art.

Destroying the myth of the 'liberal media,' the documentary shows how corporate interests influence the news coverage of key events.

8mm/03min.34sec./sound/1998

An abrasive abstract film accompanied by a scratching drone.

Interviews with 5 friends and the queer retelling of a story of a medieval saint.

Stories of lesbian, gay and transgender youth intercut with music video style short films starring the young people.

A gigantic, hairy biped creature is caught on video as it wanders through Johnny Carson Park, Burbank. Is this undeniable evidence of the existence of Bigfoot? We sent our own crew to investigate recent encounters in a quiet Los Angeles suburb. Lead by Dr. Nic Balitas, our program presents careful and meticulous analysis of the facts enabling the viewer to reach their own conclusions.

In 1939, polish writer Witold Gombrowicz arrives in Buenos Aires with the plan of staying for two weeks. But World War II breaks out in Europe, and he decides to stay in Argentina, which he will only abandon 24 years later.

With an editing engraved as a jewel, this movie is a real neo-baroque manifest. On the one hand, the Seine's sparkling, the Alexandre III bridge's sculptures and the majestic stairs descents of a mysterious personage ; on the other hand, the brilliance of a mirror reveals a lascivious inner space, invaded by art works, strange objects, tropical plants, heavy clothes, in the middle of which sit enthroned the Aesthete contemplating male nudes photos. The crystalline voice of a counter-tenor celebrating Bach perfects the voluptuous feeling emerging from this movie.

In order to break his loneliness, Le Cyclope de la Mer, a lighthouse keeper on the high seas, invents a colony of driftwood puppets to which he gives movement and voice, until one day he rescues a goldfish on the lighthouse platform.

Documentary film.

Similar to his previous work, Zòcalo, Pan is the result of synthetic cinematography - a photo animation of uncountable layers and over-lapping enriched additionally by gestural drawing. A bare winter wood marches passed, but this central motive is to be seen intact for only a short time before it is over-grown with polymorphous masks, arhythmic flashes of landscape particles. In between the more dense passages these are left isolated in empty, black space.

Full Service Automation is a non-narrative experimental animation utilizing photocopied photographs. Characterized by movement that is barely possible, incoherent, or without apparent motivation, it is a deliberately broken or failed animation. The body here becomes something unpredictable and unknown, unattached from the usual meanings, but also seems to feel more intensely. The result is an unsettling and ambiguous immediacy that is identified with both suffering and pleasure.

Radiation causes a legion of zombies to be unleashed upon the human race. A group of teenagers desperately try to stop them. Lots of blood and gore spill in the carnage that follows.

Depicting the coastal islands outside Vancouver, 'Pictures of Sound' is an enigmatic landscape portrait caught by a stationary camera. Reducing land and water into colour gradations on a flat plane, Kerr compresses and fragments temporality to focus on the gradual shifts and rhythms of light. Boats that penetrate the frame serve as reminders of the artificial world, and indeed, of the medium itself. In something akin to invading blips on a radar screen, they are rendered as computer glitches plotting their way systematically across the horizon.

The Dirt Inside uses the medium of clay in various unusual ways to tell the story of a young girl who is a victim of date rape. It attempts to communicate the loss of something very precious and irreplaceable.

An animated road movie. 11000 miles across the USA and back in a transit van with a rock and roll band, a pencil, a stack of A6 paper and 6 weeks in June to do it.

Valery Gergiev directs the Kirov Opera and Ballet in this magnificent 1998 production of Borodin’s epic Prince Igor, presented in a new Mariinsky Theatre performing edition and featuring Mikhail Fokine’s original choreography in the famous Polovtsian Dances. Its four acts tell of the struggle between the Russians and Polovtsian nomads, of Prince Igor’s capture and escape from his noble opponent, Khan Konchak, and of love between Igor’s son, Vladimir, and Konchak’s daughter, Konchakovna.

For the past seven years, cartoonist Sean Martin has brought to life the characters of 'Doc and Raider', two gay men in a committed relationship who deal with AIDS, homophobia and everyday life in the nineties. The documentary, using the framework of a Calgary gay rodeo that Sean Martin participates in each year, looks at the influences on Martin's work and the search for his own space within the gay community.