All Films

Pièce touchée

1989 • 16 min • Austria

Arnold's source material is a piece of footage from the 1950s, eighteen seconds long and very typical for the period. A quiet take: A living room, a woman in an armchair. Her husband opens the door, kisses her, then moves out of the picture accompanied by a camera pan, his wife follows after him. In Arnold's film the sequence takes 16 minutes. Cadre by cadre, it becomes an exciting tango of movements. But Pièce Touchée is more than just a matter of forms; The reflections, distortions and delays it displays challenge cinema's stable system of space and time.

Miles Davis: Live in Montreal

1989 • 59 min • Canada

Filmed at Festival International de Jazz de Montréal on June 28th, 1985. Tracklist: 1. One Phone Call, 2. Human Nature, 3. Somethings On Your Mind, 4. Time After Time, 5. Code M. D., 6. Jean Pierre

Beats of the Heart: The Spirit of the Samba: Black Music of Brazil

1989 • 60 min • United States of America

Though many outside of Brazil know samba and bossa nova through the works of crossover artists such as Antonio Carlos Jobim, the music has deep roots in Brazilian culture and history. THE SPIRIT OF SAMBA makes a complete survey of one of Brazil's national treasures.

Kick That Habit

1989 • 42 min • Switzerland

Kick That Habit is a 1989 film by PETER LIECHTI, an audio-visual portrait of his native country, eastern Switzerland. The film collects samples from the land-and-soundscape, underscoring in the process the oft-ignored industrial underpinning of our latter-day culture. Also native to eastern Switzerland is VOICE CRACK, the everyday household electronics duo of NORBERT MOSLANG and ANDY GUHL, whose musical workings are explored as part of Liechti s vision. Whether clicking quietly and rhythmically or humming and shrieking at ear-splitting volume, their recycled electronics produce innovative sounds and provide an appropriate accompaniment in this cinematic search for the detritus of our culture, the lost and destroyed remains of the last century of progress.

S.o.s.

1989 • 28 min • Japan

A film released by Family International featuring 7 pop songs promoting their religious philosophy.

The Exquisite Hour

1989 • 14 min • United States of America

Half lullaby for the dead, half lamentation on the twilight of the cinema.

Ripper

1989 • 35 min • Japan

A Japanese 8mm slasher film.

The Journey to Mexico

1989 • 29 min • France

Touching testimony of Teo Hernandez's return to his country after fifteen years of exile.

Les Almées, danseuses orientales

1989 • 26 min • France

Short film about oriental dancers.

Dreams of Passion

1989 • 5 min

Two black women meet in a dance

Eros Erosion

1989 • 41 min • United Kingdom

Through a rush of abstract and allegorical connections the film touches on transience and desire, and the silence and concealment surrounding sexuality, love, death, AIDS, and the fear of bereavement.

Schnelles Glück

1989 • 10 min • East Germany

The documentary reports on the goings-on at the only GDR racecourse in Berlin-Karlshorst. Pensioner Herta Rogau, who has been in charge of a betting counter for 15 years, tells how she came to this work and why she never dared to gamble herself. Her assessment of betting, gambling addicts, losers and winners enriches the footage shown of people at the betting counters, in the grandstand and of the exciting battles of the sulky drivers on the track.

Site/Recite (a prologue)

1989 • 4 min

With startling precision, Site/Recite moves across and around a table-top graveyard — bones, butterfly wings, egg shells, seed pods, crumpled notes, skulls — in a series of seamless edits that present a continuous flow of detailed close-ups. This taxonomy of dispossession, "little deaths that pile up," is juxtaposed to a narration on the linkage between semantic self-consciousness and visual experience. Through the window of this text, the objects on the table come to model how consciousness affixes itself to material manifestations and how memory is constituted by the collection of empty vessels. Site/Recite is a prologue for Which Tree, an interactive videodisc installation that presents viewers with a maze of interconnected branch points, allowing them to wander through its forest of images and words to discover the "texts" of their own thinking patterns.

Snail's Pace

1989 • 5 min • New Zealand

A common garden snail's high speed adventure to cross a road for a feast of lettuce.

The Boys Are Back

1989 • 60 min • Canada

Documentary that follows the Edmonton Oilers at the beginning of the 1988-89 NHL hockey season, as Wayne Gretzky makes his return with the Los Angeles Kings for the first time since being traded.

The Making of 'The Little Mermaid'

1989 • 46 min

Making of the classic The Little Mermaid

Flying Image

1989 • 3 min • Germany

We swoop through action-filled rooms. Again and again, we fly past people and events without ever recognizing what is really going on. This film is a three-minute version of an endless-loop video originally designed as a project for exhibitions. It was shown at the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart and the Goethe Institut in Paris.

Eve

1989 • 28 min • Soviet Union

Silent serious people buy weapons. They are taking him by a caravan of trucks through Moscow. One of them changes into new clothes and leaves the others for his beloved girlfriend, who lives in the capital.

The Great AZT Debate

1989 • 30 min

AIDS activists discuss the merits and harms of AZT, one of the first drugs approved to treat HIV.

Auf den Spuren von GutsMuths

1989 • 26 min • East Germany, Germany

Johann Friedrich GutsMuths (1759-1839) was an educator and co-founder of gymnastics. He developed an entire system of gymnastic exercises for young people and summarized it in the book "Gymnastics for Young People" as a kind of instruction book. At a time when sporting activity was frowned upon, he had at least one hour of gymnastics a day at the Salzmannsche Erziehungsanstalt in Schnepfenthal (Thuringia). GutsMuth's work as the founder of the Volkssport movement is brought to life through contemporary testimonies, pictures and quotes.

The World is Sick (sic)

1989 • 38 min

An experimental documentary on the activist interventions at the Fifth International Conference on AIDS in Montreal, in June 1989. While making fun of television news conventions, the tape prioritizes the voices of grassroots AIDS educators and People with AIDS activists from Trinidad, Thailand, South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Demonstrations and interventions by AIDS activists from Montreal, Toronto, and the United States take centre stage, literally.

Faces of Dying III

1989 • 46 min

The third film in the Death Faces series

The Flower

1989 • 24 min • Japan

Ueda, Koike and Keiko are in their fourth year at university. The time limit on their paradise of university is drawing to a close, and they are all feeling impatient in their own ways. Keiko is unable to find a job. Ueda is unsure of Keiko's feelings. Koike is torn between her dream of becoming a novelist and the reality of finding a job. The summer is passing. As if to hold on to their time in paradise, they enjoy a late night of fireworks. In his dreams, Koike sees a strange family picture. The image of the three of them sitting around a make-shift table on a riverbank overgrown with summer grass softly and unobtrusively conveys to the viewer their anxiety about their ambiguous future. The film's sincere image of adolescence is heartbreaking.

Born to Be Babe

1989 • 30 min • Japan

Mikage is unable to bear a child due to fibroids in her uterus. On the night she breaks up with her lover, she gives herself up to Sakurai, who adores her. Sakurai tells her that he will take Mikage's place as her child, but the next day he turns into a real boy. Mikage is surprised, but she begins to love him like a mother and a sister. At the same time, a news report about the unsettling world situation comes on the radio... The film is a realistic portrayal of a fantasy, with a tightly constructed structure and assured direction that adheres to theory. The ending, which seems to foretell of Japan in the near future, is a heartbreaking coincidence with the title of the film.