All Films

Canvas

1993 • 21 min • Japan

A breath of light, a film poem by in-camera editing that is more sensory than experimental. Image sketches made with short shots while swinging the camera.

君はサルじゃない

1993 • 40 min • Japan

A friend of mine suddenly turned into a monkey. It was one day during spring break, when everyone got together and started playing cards as usual. But for some reason, Takizawa was the only one who kept losing. As a punishment, he is made to drink whisky in one gulp, but as soon as he puts on a toy monkey mask, he turns into a real monkey. Kinoshita, who is now living with the monkey Takizawa, tries somehow to turn him back into a human, but without success. When the new school year begins with Takizawa still a monkey, Kinoshita becomes impatient and decides to make a last-ditch effort... What is human identity? is blended into the everyday scenery and cartoony setting without any sense of discomfort. The audience will find themselves moved by the seemingly ridiculous laughter.

クール・バナナ

1993 • 10 min • Japan

At the last moment, my grandmother said. "...Banana. It's been a long time since all the relatives of the Yoshimoto family gathered at the main house. Grandma was in a critical condition. As everyone looked on at her bedside, she murmured. Bananas...". Does Grandma want to eat bananas so badly? My grandson runs. Every time a box of bananas that he has worked so hard to get is plucked and placed in the mouths of his relatives, a little piece of drama emerges. I want to eat the last banana. This bizarre and comical setting is a true story that the director read in a magazine once. The conversations between men, daughters-in-law and grandchildren that take place at family gatherings are stereotypical and familiar to everyone. The boringness of the film, on the contrary, results in a contrast between life and death.

お前にゆわれる筋合いはない！

1993 • 26 min • Japan

Whoever wins, in the end, wins in the end? What is the difference between logic and quibbling? The world is full of things we don't understand, but there are plenty of examples. So one man set out to deal with the evils of the world, and all its falsehoods, at random. His name is Ipponsuji. Don't worry about his real name! This is a documentary made in the grammar of fiction, focusing on the character of the ally of justice, his work, interviews and films he has made", says the director. This is a superhero film with a radical mix of wildness and seriousness, with a commercial break in the middle.

全滅野球軍

1993 • 10 min • Japan

Run for home base. Cross the city and defeat the enemy. In the future, baseball has become a murderous game in which cyborgs, enhanced for baseball, fight for their lives. Today, in a city abandoned by humans, the game is played on the entire city. He literally defeats the traitors and the players of the opposing team who stand in his way, and then he runs, looking at the corpses of the killed players of the same team beside him. He runs for home base. No matter how many people he kills, no matter who is killed, the cyborg player does not scream, does not shed a tear. No, he may just hide the tears that flow behind his artificial eyelids, the cries that are born in the depths of his artificial throat. In order to fulfill his mission to step on the platform. There is a style that can truly be called "near-future baseball hard-boiled".

The Butterfly Man

1993 • 10 min • United Kingdom

A cruel huntsman takes his anger out on invading bugs. Was originally made as part of the MA course in Media Productions at Canterbury Christ Church College.

春風

1993 • 29 min • Japan

Shizuko is at a good age when she can forget her lost love with chocolate. Shizuko is always a little in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the day of her graduation ceremony, she finds out that the boy she's been eyeing has a girlfriend, and on top of that, he hears the sound of her stomach growling. She is so shocked that she runs up to the rooftop and meets a girl named Sorae. She says that she hates school and loves to sit on the roof and look at the sky, which makes Shizuko forget her sadness. Sorae also opens her heart to Shizuko, who, like her, is not good at what she does, but somehow likes school. On the day of the graduation ceremony, the two classmates exchange words for the first time and go home together like best friends. The Osaka dialect and the careful, unpretentious imagery subtly create the warm, fluffy quality of the title.

Dege Sutra-Printing House

1993 • 31 min

Screened in the New Asian Current section of the 1993 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Filmed at the Dege Sutra-Printing House in Dege County, Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, on the edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Known as the "shining pearl under the snow-capped mountains of Tibet," the Dege Sutra-Printing House (at the time this was shot) contains more than 400 books, 900 volumes, and nearly 270,000 printed documents, spanning Nyingma, Sakya, Bonbu, and Gelug sect classics and various other Tibetan Buddhist texts.

The Funeral in Tonga

1993 • 30 min • Tonga, United States of America

Funerals are of enormous cultural significance in the Kingdom of Tonga. In contrast with the taboos regarding death in Western society, death in the Kingdom of Tonga follows a highly ritualized grieving process. The last journey is accompanied by joyous song, hair cutting, gift giving, changing of the garb, lovingly made mats and tapa and social protocol. This documentary video provides an ethnographic window into the Tongan funeral ceremonies and explains the process through which the people elevate their deceased to the role of ancestor.

Venice in Berlin in Venice

1993 • 6 min • Germany, United States of America

While visiting Berlin, Baldino turned on her hotel room's television to find Venice Beach, California. She recorded the television image — a long, steady shot of the beach, surf, and bathers. Later, in California, she played back the unexplained and anonymous footage directly in front of the spot it depicted. She then videotaped the scene: the original broadcast, in ghostly miniature on a hand-held TV, and, in the background, its real-world double.

The King Does Not Lie

1993 • 43 min

This film shows the Afro-Cuban religion, Santeria, whose New World practitioners have too often been maligned out of ignorance and prejudice and even harassed by authorities. In this intimate documentary we see a contemporary Puerto Rican community of "santeros" gather for the initiation of a priest of Shango, the "Thundergod" of the traditional Yoruba religion. As we follow the initiate through a series of ritual events, a new perspective on ancient rites is revealed. The religion originated in Africa and the chants are sung in Yoruba.

Coiled

1993 • 8 min

A ‘hieroglyphic remembrance’ of desire for love, exploring heterosexual desire amidst the Fever Zone of homoerotic mysteries and narcissistic compulsion.(…)

Kazakh Pre-Muslim Ceremonies and Religious Faiths

1993 • 18 min • Kazakhstan

The mythic parables and traditions connection with death as The Return to the Womb of Sky. The symbolism of the actions of the funerary rituals are described. Mr. Kayirbekov has also done films about the rituals of childbirth, marriage, the symbolic parts of the yurt, and the Kazakh cosmological concept.

Oley

1993 • 10 min

harvest time in Oley Valley.

Vom Sternescheutzen

1993 • 12 min

An absurd list of sequences, each dedicated to a mood, include found footage, grotesque double exposures, and clear referencing of physicality.

Avec Matisse à Tanger

1993 • 50 min • France, Morocco

The film chronicles Henri Matisse's travels to Tangier as he seeks new motifs for his paintings from a Moroccan perspective. Henri Matisse made two trips to Tangier in early 1912 and in the winter of 1912-1913, seaching for new motifs for his paintings. The lush colors and sensuous imagery of North Africa proved extraordinarily fruitful. Matisse completed twenty-three paintings – many of them master works – and more than sixty pen-and-ink drawings.

Bust

1993 • 23 min • Armenia

A funny and sad story about how two friends accidentally smashed a bust of Stalin and what happened next.

TV Interruptions ’93

1993 • 8 min

Commissioned by MTV Networks, produced by Annalogue, and transmitted worldwide (unannounced) through 1993-94.’Conceived in the spirit of the 1971 pieces, TV Interruptions 93 were shot or post-produced using advanced colour video technology, electronic effects and a refinement gained over Hall’s 25 years work in time-based media. Taken together, they constitute a potted summary of Hall’s preoccupations in video and television, and perhaps of the progression of video art as a ‘genre’…

Emotional Gel Scenery

1993 • 26 min

A video correspondence between Yoichiro Serizawa and Shinji Takeyoshi.

Mirror of Tunisia/Tunisia, the Trance and the Stone

1993 • 51 min • France, Tunisia

Tunisia itself is the subject; we wanted to render the genius of the site. Tunisia is almost the central character of this little film: we see the relation of the city to the sea, the traces that bear witness to its foundation, the remains of Carthage, the symbolism of the recently discovered Medina coin … The splendours of the house interiors and courtyards are associated with a scene of origin, what psychoanalysis calls a primal scene. Entering these houses opens up a world peopled by women: the child’s ‘homecoming’ in the hands of women is staged as an abduction, playing doubly on fascination and terror. These places were mine, from my childhood, they can be found almost intact – it’s the return of the exile visiting the kingdom. I let Ruiz discover all this, and immediately that led him to echoes and resonances ranging from Spain to Chile.

Joy of the body

1993 • 9 min

Short experimental film

Ambalagamma

1993 • 4 min

Ambient cornucopia of the caravaggian nature mortes

Out of time

1993 • 9 min

Small-waisted black ant woman crawling on the ground under the merciless magnifying glass.

Blind Grace

1993 • 20 min

Blind Grace is a tense, poetic essay on the marginal people and forgotten places of New York City. Chance, fleeting meetings between the filmaker and passers-by are caught on film. A homeless man builds a Christmas tree from trash and discarderd cans on 42nd Street. Ted, the bird-man, makes his daily rounds, feeding thousands of pigeons. A man, believing himself to be a prophet, makes ritualized signals towards a place that only he can see, mediating between the stained sidewalk and the sky over New York. Between the immediacy of documentary photography and the more stylised pictoral juxtapositions, the spectator is invited on a resolutely singular and personal visit of the city.