All Films

How Did Esther Get on the Table?

1986 • 10 min

A little girl fidgets by the desk at which her father is working. Suddenly she appears on top of the table, where she shrinks to only a few centimetres in size. The scene launches into a series of surrealistic objects of her environment. She is comforted with many situations that could conceivably happen to her in the future, and they prove to be more threatening than reassuring. At the end of film we find Esther restored to her normal self again, sitting on the lap of her father.

Fenomen

1986 • 7 min • Romania

This celebratory ode to the life of the potato explores the structures and shapes of the root vegetable with a monumental orchestral accompaniment and the help of a dynamic camera. Dazzling rays of sunlight penetrate the wicker incubator and illuminate in backlight the impressive tangle of roots and wrinkled skin of the agricultural crop.

Sechse kommen durch den Herbst

1986 • 15 min • East Germany, Germany

A hike around the GDR without any record ambitions, just the desire to experience something, to challenge themselves, to get to know the country and its people - their own country, their own people - better. Six men, aged between 25 and 40, set off on a hike, curious about everything they will encounter along the way between Cottbus and Zittau - nature, sights, people. The viewer gradually realizes that there is actually a sensation behind this seemingly natural, visibly unspectacular, cheerful process. This is already the 13th stage of the planned hike around the country. Memories of previous stages make the scale clear. The men, who we have already got to know quite well over the five days, manage the daily 25 to 30 kilometers with such ease because they are passionate athletes: Mountaineers in Saxon Switzerland.

The Paper House

1986 • 2 min • Japan

A very short animation drawn on tracing paper with a brush pen and coloured pencil. “This work was inspired by an impressive dream. In the dream, I took a dictionary that printed flip-books in the corner from a book shelf, and when I returned it, the book had disappeared.”[Yuko Asano]

Hey Ängel

1986 • 27 min • Sweden

Poet Bruno K. Öijer is working on his debut album with Brynn Settels

Coup D'etat: The Philippines Revolt

1986 • 60 min • Australia

Peter Couchman presents this story, which documents the four days leading up to the overthrow of the Philippines Marcos government in 1986.

Sweat

1986 • 13 min • Tunisia

SUEUR is one of only two films to be kept in the archive of the Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 8mm format. It was shown in competition at the 34th Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1988, submitted by director Amor Nagazi, as he recalls it, on his own initiative. The jury of the FIPRESCI International Federation of Film Critics awarded SUEUR a second prize. In accordance with festival regulations, the award resulted in the purchase of the film for the archive. At the time, director Amor Nagazi was a member of an amateur film club in his hometown of Kairouan, Tunisia. SUEUR was his first film, shot on Super 8 with the help of a small team of friends from the film club. Step by step, the film documents the artisanal production of mud bricks, which were once used to build not only the majority of buildings in Kairouan, but also the imposing city wall.

Mediations (towards a remake of Soundings)

1986 • 4 min

“The beginning of a remake of an earlier work [Soundings, 1979] in which I wanted to extend the reflexivity of each text in relation to the interaction between different physical substances—in this case, sand—and the speaker cone. A loudspeaker fills the screen and I begin to speak, referring to the speaker itself. This is followed by more declarations of what I am doing, ‘…a hand enters the picture….’ A hand filled with sand enters the picture and slowly releases it into the loudspeaker’s cone. Every nuance of speech vibrates the speaker’s cone (or membrane), bouncing the grains of sand into the air. The more I speak about what is happening, the more it changes—or feeds back into—the movement and patterns of the sand."

Bye-Bye, Mail

1986 • 4 min • Japan

In four minutes, the delicate and lyrical sensibility of a female filmmaker permeates the viewer's mind in this short film made up of only four shots. On a lightly rainy spring day, the filmmaker arrives at the beach with her camera, and asks two friends to be her subjects, lying on their stomachs on the rain-soaked ground, she slowly zooms in on them as they walk down the street from a low angle. The cut brings back the feeling of the cold ground, familiar to anyone who has ever shot 8mm, and before you know it you find yourself looking through the viewfinder with the artist. A visual diary was casually written with awkward and confident sketches of the landscape and shy narration.

Blue Lament

1986 • 3 min • Japan

hi-lite

1986 • 32 min • Japan

A collection of short shorts, a dozen or so short episodes and gags in 32 minutes. From the hilarious to the thought-provoking, all of the short films have an urban sense of humour, especially the second half, "My right hand, my left foot and the back of my head at the age of 23", which is full of wit and humour, firing like a machine gun. In the latter half of the film, the witty monologue and the rhythmical development of the images are beautifully synchronized, and the light but flexible "23-year-old me" speaks eloquently of his existence. Many of the film's gags are made up of deformed gags about the funny things that happen in the daily life of the author, a student, and the uniqueness of the characters makes this a film that will be loved by many people.

Chornobyl. Breaking Bread

1986 • 11 min • Soviet Union

Short documentary about the soldiers who worked in the rear, baking bread for the liquidators. The leitmotif that set the pace for the entire film was the countdown of the metronome, as every minute was extremely important.

A Strange Affair

1986 • 35 min • Japan

When her older sister disappears, she meets the man she left behind every night. When her parents don't come home from work, they sit in the kitchen and have an idle conversation. The man asks her to eat a clam. A woman mumbles, "I have sand all over me", and scours the kitchen floor like a mollusk. The man wipes the woman's neck when she asks him to wipe off the sand. The camera lingers on the faces of the two men and the rummaging in the sink as they mutter idle conversations about sand. This is a dense cinematic space, where the hot, rough texture of the sand makes your whole body tingle. The coquettishness of the woman's hair, her neck, her lips, her tongue, her gestures and her voice, captured by the gazing camera, is an intense eroticism. This is a work of high perfection in which the artist's unique world of sensuality is penetrated.

Un film

1986 • 47 min

Motorway, roads, villages of Northern France, Flanders. A man with a Super 8 camera films his route, the villagers and himself. Portraits, self-portrait. As the images unfold a young villager, Josse, is intrigued by the camera’s presence. For the cameraman the lens is an eye with which one films reality, for the villager the camera represents CINEMA, the magic of fiction. Josse accosts the cameraman and leads him across the fields where his girlfriend joins them. The outing becomes their production, with themselves in front of the camera. Games. Gradually diverted by Josse’s enthousiasme the film slides into moments of fiction, until its inevitable breakdown.

Myriam's Gaze

1986 • 24 min • Colombia

Myriam tells her story. Like her mother¸ she decided to occupy a vacant lot to build a house to live in with her children. She constants aims to express affection towards her children, and avoid repeating her bitter childhood due to the harsh treatment she received from her mother and those around her. She wants to harness all her energy — which as a child she perceived in her gaze as having an enormous destructive capacity — to become a leader of her community.

Typhoon Tamara

1986 • 10 min • Soviet Union

The story of an energetic Russian woman, Tamara Fedorovna who moved to Leninabad in the 1950s and, as a pensioner, became a trainer for a men’s soccer team and performed in the local amateur theater. Then, after three or four years, thousands of Russians would have to leave Tajikistan as would Tamara.

Narrative Information

1986 • 9 min

"Narrative Information is an exhibition of four of my short story computer-video sculptures. Abortion, language, relationships, and war are my subject matter. I endeavor to get the viewer involved in my interplay between the simple and the complex, between the child and adult narrative viewpoints, and between the image and the technology that produces it all wrapped up in my simmering dark humor." -CFG

Something is Seen But One Doesn't Know What

1986 • 1 min

A film by Keith Sanborn

Kac

1986 • 2 min • Poland

An angel and devil fight for the soul of a drunkard who cannot resist just one more drink.

Shuttle Disaster

1986 • 6 min

Short film.

Perpetuum Mobile

1986 • 4 min

Perpetual motion is the central theme of this video composition in which Bielický connects various physical and mechanical movements in several layers. It is also the first video in which his characteristic style of video collage is fully established.

The Drug Knot

1986 • 60 min

Doug is a high school teen who has everything: Loving parents and younger brother, terrific girlfriend, and a rock band he plays in after school. Doug also has a drug habit, and all those good things begin to fall by the wayside as his drug dependency and erratic behavior worsen and alienation sets in.

Money Talks Bullshit Walks

1986 • 36 min

"Money Talks Bullshit Walks is a quote from a prostitute I picked up off Church Street in the winter of 1985. During this time, I picked up and interviewed nine hookers. The tape is an assemblage of this information." -R.W.

Atomic Dreams

1986 • 7 min • United States of America

Recurring nuclear nightmares.