All Films

Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896

1991 • 9 min

Found Footage avantgarde film.

Life According to Luke

1991 • 14 min • France

Few of the characteristics that can be associated with Jean Paul Civyrac can be seen in his first film, a 14 minute short feature. Inevitably, considering its short length, the film is necessarily very much a character study, since there is little room to develop much in the way of a plot. Luc (Jean Descanvelle) is a young man who is determined to do things his own way and consequently conflicts with everyone he meets. He doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks, isn’t interested in any advice they might have to give and is not interested in assistance from friends or family. He is going to do things his way, and do whatever it takes to make money, which is mainly performing sexual favours for any man who is willing to pay for it.

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts

1991 • 30 min • United States of America

The winner of numerous festival prizes, this early work by Lynne Sachs is a provocative film essay on women's perspectives on their bodies in a "man's world." It touches on everything from the female form's depiction in Renaissance art to the school of 19th century "scientific" thought equating "abnormal" physiognomy with criminality. This adventurous collage also features the filmmaker's own diaristic recollections (notably of being fitted for a diaphragm by a cold, intimidating doctor), poetical staged sequences, other women's audio testimonies, an old classroom instructional reel about menstruation, prose by Gertrude Stein and feminine "ideals" like the undulating young woman performing in fish-tail costumes at Florida's kitschy Weeki-Wachee Springs "Underwater Mermaid Theater." - Dennis Harvey

Charlotte

1991 • 3 min

In principle of repetition of a fragment, CHARLOTTE is close to [Fontaine's earlier film] La fissure.

Sabotaging Spring

1991 • 10 min

Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. SABOTAGING SPRING is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains the facts of life, evolution, and whistling to his dog Woody.

Easter Egg Mornin'

1991 • 24 min

Picasso "Speedy" Cottontail likes to boast of his fame as the egg-painting Easter bunny. However, when the chickens who lay all those eggs go on strike, Speedy finds himself in a fix. Speedy learns an important lesson about cooperation--as he and his barnyard friends bring a happy Easter to children everywhere.

Jean Rouch: First Film 1947-1991

1991 • 27 min

The first film in Jean Rouch's filmography is not his first film at all. It was edited by a French news company, using images he had shot but organised into a very different sequence from his own. On top of that, it was accompanied by a colonialist commentary said by a sports reporter! As we watch, Jean Rouch ad-libs a new commentary more in keeping with his images, and so, in 1991, he finally finishes his first film! - Dominique Dubosc

Introduction to the Secret Society

1991 • 7 min

A half-baked, but tenderized world view offered up for the new arrivals. An abstracted experimental narrative based on three images: face, figure, and crowd. A collage film of representational images of the human figure without being portraiture or performance.

Behind the Burning Cross: Racism USA

1991 • 27 min

A key overview of twentieth-century American fascism and antifascism produced in 1991 by the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.

Sidet: Forced Exile

1991 • 60 min

During the past two decades, more than two million refugees have left Ethiopia. Famine, poverty and political strife as well as the religious persecution caused by Eritrea’s annexation have already cost countless lives. Narrated by Salem Mekuria, an Ethiopian filmmaker in the US, this lucid documentary presents the life stories of three women refugees in neighboring Sudan. It traces the attempts of individual women to survive displacement, resettlement camps and ineffectual bureaucracy. An astute, politically sophisticated analysis of social and economic crisis from the perspective of Third World women.

The Price of Our Liberty

1991 • 9 min • Finland

The film is about the Winter War 1939-40 in Uusimaa, Turku, Pori and Vyborg.

Fahrt nach Kairo

1991 • 60 min

Travelgue through the outskirts of Kairo.

Something of Mine

1991 • 50 min

A ring of devil worshipers bring forth a demon and let it loose at a campus Halloween spook show.

A State of Blackness: Aimé Césaire’s Way

1991 • 59 min

Documentary exploring the thought and work of Aimé Césaire.

Champion Number One

1991 • 39 min • Soviet Union

The leader of a gang of notorious criminals in Almaty, Kazakhstan defends himself in court, is sentenced to ten years in prison, organizes the country's first prison cooperative, and, after his release, becomes arm wrestling champion of the USSR.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Rondo. Allegro z Serenady G-dur KV 525

1991 • 5 min • Poland

From the series of animated films to classical music.

Mirakelet

1991 • 13 min • Norway

"The Miracle" - A Norwegian filmmaker apply for support from the public culture authority. The project is called "Historien om Terje Vigen" - an epic poem by Henrik Ibsen. A story about a sailor who suffers the loss of his family through the cruelty of another man. The applicant is turned down by an almost unanimous board. Arild Kristo reports the events through sketchy animations.

Blue: A Tlingit Odyssey

1991 • 6 min

Anthropologist Robert Ascher depicts a myth of the Pacific Northwest Coast Tlingit using the purely symbolic, visual language of direct, cameraless animation. Positing an enchanting, engaging, non-Western alternative to verbal, analytical methods of documentation, he also considered this approach a noninvasive method of portraying an indigenous culture.

Bodies in Trouble

1991 • 15 min • Canada

Bodies in Trouble exposes the lesbian body as a battlefield in the context of a right-wing blacklash. Juxtaposing sexual passion with sexual fear, the lesbian eroticism presented by Bociurkiw is inscribed with danger and courage. Using the 1990's summer raid at the Sex Garage in Montreal as a backdrop, Bociurkiw positions her film as a vibrant and pointed critic of the political and social abuse against the homosexual communities.

Boudou prend son bain

1991 • 4 min • France

War Songs

1991 • 12 min • United States of America

Paul Schmidt sent me a set of five poems from a series called WAR SONGS. He treats the war in a brilliant and sarcastic way, evokes his seduction. Mark Bennett's score is itself provocative, languorous, and close to a waltz. The whole thing is a series of songs cast in the mode of melodrama, that is to say music in tandem with a narration. My contribution lies in the superimposition of war scenes, coupled with what I called an image of Gabriel: a young and handsome soldier, a personification of the good warrior, a protective image. He gives off strong impressions throughout the duration of the film. She makes him appear sometimes active and aggressive, sometimes asleep or beckoning. The film uses footage from the Vietnam War and World War II. They show soldiers marching, tanks rolling. Explosions reveal in passing our dear “Gabriel”.

Montre-moi si vraiment du ciel tu es l'élu

1991 • 14 min • France

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Ten Thousand Points of Light

1991 • 32 min

Kitsch alert! Worshippers at the shrine of Elvis and followers of pop culture take note. Ten Thousand Points of Light is a wry, understated and terrifically funny look at the Townsends, a suburban Atlanta family, who every holiday season for eight years, transformed their Stone Mountain area brick ranch house into a meteoric blaze of Christmas lights. Known as both “the Christmas House” and the “the Elvis House”, the Townsend’s home was visited yearly by vast numbers of people, many of whom viewed a trip to the land of a thousand tchotchkes as an annual pilgrimage.

Temperature of Time

1991 • 5 min • Japan

Mainly working with simple, soft-lined drawing animation, Yamamoto aggressively takes in live action images from the late 1980s. Though this piece starts out with live action filming, the eventual appearance of the "phenakistoscope" animation composed with live action images is a true gem. Yamamoto always has been acknowledged for her skill in blowing in "anima – spirit" and boldly tries out a new experiment of blending it in with the live action image. What is awesome is that the huge phenakistoscope that appears in the live action shooting with no composites has power to nullify virtual distance and existence within what is called the image. There, a "composite-like reality" emerges.