All Films

Wild Dead I, II, III

1984 • 7 min

Two-channel video on four CRT monitors with soundtracks by Stuart Argabright and Michael Diekmann.

ほたる

1984 • 12 min • Japan

Rescue

1984 • 30 min

Nichy determined to get to the basketball tournament in town, storm or no storm! "You're only a substitute!," cried one of his sisters. What really happened weaves an unforgettable adventure for young and old. A presentation of the gospel and Christian values long to be remembered. Running Time 30 minutes. A Ken Anderson Films Presentation.

Suzanne

1984 • 51 min

About Danish author Suzanne Brøgger's strictly scheduled everyday life, interleaved with conversations and philosophical reflections.

Only For a One Day

1984 • 10 min • Soviet Union

The film is about the life of insects that develop for 3 long years under water and come to land only for one day, after which they die.

Turn off the lights when you leave

1984 • 10 min • Soviet Union

An experimental associative film. One day of a person's life or an entire lifetime is depicted with abstract techniques of conditional cinema, inspired by the surrealist movement. Participants : Igors Linga, Žanete, Viktors, Ints, Vija.

Longing for Spring

1984 • 13 min • Japan

A visual poem where a woman visits various Buddhist temples in Nara and winter turns to spring.

The Silent Scream

1984 • 29 min

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former abortionist and founder of NARAL, teaches the audience about the specifics of suction abortion, followed by an actual abortion of an 11-week old fetus as seen through ultrasound.

Rodney Rude - Live

1984 • 58 min • Australia

In the early 1980s Rodney Rude was hired by his friend Barry Wain to set up the first stand-up comedy venue in Sydney, The Margaret Lane Comedy Store. With Rodney Rude as the driving force, the comedy scene became huge and Rodney was as busy as a five peckered spider. This was the heyday of pub comedy and this video of the 'Rodney Rude Live, I Hate That' album, is a glimpse into this very funny period. This first Rodney Rude album epitomised his early comedy store period and along with his television appearances made Rodney Rude, with his catchphrase 'You Know What I Hate', a household name. The most frequently asked question over the years by Rude fans has been when will the 'Rodney Rude, I Hate That' video be available on DVD? The answer is: NOW

The Garden of Melons

1984 • 10 min • Vietnam

Rabbit, Squirrel and Monkey help Bear realize that if you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor, you must know how to sow.

Gradiva

1984 • 16 min • United States of America

Gradiva deals with a man who constructs/creates an idealized image of a woman, seductive but false.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: A Chipmunk Valentine

1984 • 30 min • United States of America

In this musical adventure, Alvin develops an alter ego after Brittany rejects his offer to the Valentine Ball. In a dream state, he becomes a dashing Don Juan, the Valentine heartbreaker extraordinaire CAPTAIN CHIPMUNK. Brittany is quickly won over and eagerly accepts his offer to the Valentine Ball. Hilarious consequences follow when Alvin wakes up at the dance and realizes he’s not the dashing debonair Captain Chipmunk.

Being and Doing

1984 • 55 min • United Kingdom

About Performance Art and its historical origins including its links with folk customs. The film includes extracts from the work of many different performance artists from England and abroad collected from 1979 to 1983, amongst them: Tibor Hajas (Hungary), Rasa Todosijevic (Yugoslavia), Iain Robertson (Scotland), Zbigniew Warpechowski (Poland), Milan Knizak (Czechoslovakia), Natalia LL (Poland), Ewa Partum (Poland), Jan Mlcoch (Czechoslovakia), Sonia Knox (Northern Ireland), Jerzy Beres (Poland) and Stuart Brisley (England). The film also records the Haxey Hood and Padstow Hobbyhorse folk dances from Lincolnshire and Cornwall respectively.

Temporal

1984 • 11 min • Brazil

In the same house, on the same night, two groups meet. One, made up of very serious gentlemen, members of a religious-monarchist order. The other, a bunch of crazy people in animal costumes, at a party with sex and rock’n’roll. When the storm starts and the lights go out, anything can happen.

The Box Theory (Ireko Riron)

1984 • 16 min • United States of America

In The Box Theory, Owen Land, the uncanny American structuralist, king of the absurd and a religious addict, recreates the image of the Indian girl, holding the butter box with the image of herself, to produce an ad-eternal video zoom. This operation generates a vertiginous and hypnotic mise-en-abyme centered on the female body. This moving mantra raises the figure of the girl to the status of medieval icon – Our Lady of the O – a fertility goddess from the prodigious and polysemic land Of Land.

Beach Events

1984 • 8 min • Canada

This film completes a trilogy of landscape/poetry films, which include “Waterworx” (1982) and “Landfall” (1983), and was shot near the family home on the Northumberland Strait in Prince Edward Island. In writing the text for “Beach Events,” I wanted to challenge the cinema's dominant present tense by imitating primitive “event” poetry, referring superficially to action present on the screen, but gradually slipping out of synchronization with its referent. This practice, together with reading a kind of sub-conscious, internal monologue (also based on the film's events, but only those past and future), helps the viewer transcend the spectacle of the present, and be aware of a larger temporal universe. In this film it informs a dialectic of internal and external nature, temporal presence and absence, the conscious and sub-conscious. (RH)

The Firebird

1984 • 10 min • Soviet Union

Vasilisa the Beautiful is kidnapped by an evil force that has invaded her kingdom. Prince Ivan fails when he tries to save her and the kingdom. He decides to seek help from the mighty firebird.

Covert Action

1984 • 10 min • United States of America

Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to "disarm my movies." "I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive."

Who is Stronger?

1984 • 8 min • Soviet Union

How Alyosha rehabilitated a rude man.

The Naked Killer

1984 • 43 min • Italy

It is known that Muybridge was at the same time a great photographer and a killer, executioner of his wife’s lover and that into his own station physiologique (to use Marey’s term for his own working laboratory), it seems, not a single black man ever entered. Female servants, the unemployed, artists’ models supplied by the State, musclemen, the infirm and prostitutes were all undressed there. They all ran, people as well as animals under the sun of Palo Alto. In this P. T. Barnum style atmosphere, a melancholy Noah’s Ark, Muybridge himself would appear as a laborer nude.

Ver-O-Peso

1984 • 14 min • Brazil

Belém, northern Brazil; a tourist and a beggar meet in Ver-O-Peso market, a culturally rich site in Amazon.

On Poetry

1984 • 12 min • Italy

An essay on contemporary Italian poetry with the works of Dario Bellezza and Amelia Rosselli.

Hong Kong Topography: Näherungen

1984 • 12 min • Germany, Hong Kong

Trying to approach the city – but constant rejection

Die Geschichte vom Kalif Storch

1984 • 28 min • East Germany

Caliph Harun al-Rashid was turned into a stork by a power-greedy rival. Only with the help of his wise vizier and a beautiful princess is he able to escape the spell. Based on a fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff.