All Films

Krieg etc.

1983 • 4 min

Schatzl's schizophrenic animation of planes and falling paratroopers

Leonard Nimoy: Star Trek Memories

1983 • 49 min • United States of America

A TV special hosted by Leonard Nimoy and featuring the actor discussing the making of "The Original Series" and the first two Star Trek movies, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan". Also included is a short preview of "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock".

A Goofy Look at Valentine's Day

1983 • 7 min • United States of America

An educational short featuring Goofy about Valentine's Day.

Holiday

1983 • 11 min • Yugoslavia

Experimental short film.

Formula Super VIII

1983 • 2 min

1983 German Super 8 short work

Craex Apart

1983 • 6 min

1983 German Super 8 short-form work.

Film-Wipe-Film

1983 • 28 min

The film is a journal (drawn by hand over a period of four years), opera, and journey through 100 animated sequences which are joined and transformed by 100 film wipes in continuous successsion. The film is a synthesis of both abstract and figurative imagery, analysis and commentary, writing and multiple languages, multi-layered sounds and music, lyrical and contrapuntal relationships, and elaborate animated compositions. The film plays with the thresholds of change between intuition and analytical thinking, as well as between what is read or heard as "figurative" or "abstract." The various animation sequences range from pure geometric abstraction to symbols, metaphors and icons (boxing ring, car, chair, airplanes, steps).

Landfall

1983 • 11 min • Canada

Landfall was shot in Prince Edward Island, near the family home on the Northumberland Strait. The original footage, shot in 1974, was a kind of interactive, camera “dance” with the environment. Poetry became important when the footage was later superimposed onto its own mirror-image, to help direct the viewer away from the luring yet limited world of image-identification. “I Thought There Were Limits,” by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, w as used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions of space and time, and to conceptualize the film’s interplay between absence, desire, and presence. Eventually, the limitation of text as spoken signifier is exposed through dynamic visual techniques reminiscent of concrete poetry. (RH)

Welcome/Adieu

1983 • 3 min

A patriotic rendering of all the verses of God Save the Queen with some Victorian lantern slides.

Peppimenarti

1983 • 48 min

In 1976 a number of Aboriginal people left missions and settlements to return to live on their tribal lands, between the Daly River and Port Keats, in the far north of the Northern Territory. Peppimenarti is a vast area of flood plains, rivers and forests. Its waters team with fish, its skies with birds. The Peppimenarti people began to convert this enormous tract of land into a cattle station. They brought in helicopters to muster the cattle that were already there, cattle so wild they easily escaped conventional muster by stockmen. They built yards, roads and houses and set up a store and a school. They also began to build up their ceremonial life. Today it is a successful cattle station, run by Aboriginal people, and a permanent town of several hundred. The Peppimenarti story has become an inspiration to other Indigenous Australians.

About Baby Mammoth

1983 • 9 min

Mammoth saves a favorite flower from the cold. A heartbreaking puppet cartoon about duty and affection.

Conversations with Roy DeCarava

1983 • 28 min • United States of America

Profiles the career of Roy DeCarava, the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship.

Chicken Movie. Cluck!

1983 • 20 min

An urban poem, in which a chauffeur drives his Madam about in downtown Johannesburg; visits to friends, townships, wastelands. The trip ends with a nuptial-funeral ball where the men dance to the cock's crow and the rhythm of Zulu music. The film captures a certain Zeitgeist of the city of Johannesburg during the period of state of emergency in South Africa.

Beer Drinkers in Space

1983 • 59 min

In 1983, a group of friends who worked at Disney made a movie. It took nine long months to complete and consumed their lives as they constructed spaceship sets in their homes and garages. Elaborate models and pyrotechnics were shot. The intrepid moviemakers popped open a few beers and got in front of the camera to shoot this camp comedy feature about Captain Slosh and his bumbling crew of beer drinkers...in space!

Fireside

1983 • 6 min • United States of America

Inspired by enjoyment of looking into a bonfire or hearth, seeing shapes coalesce and disperse fleetingly, or by feeling the mind's desire work with the forms of flame that dance. The cinema is a similar form to that. Made without a camera by etching unexposed film with sandpaper, chemicals and light.

Les tournesols colorés

1983 • 3 min • France

Les tournesols colorés is derived from the same footage used in Les tournesols, but with candy colors, giving other modulations to movie movements. The two versions can be shown one after the other, although they were designed to be played separately.

Possibilities, or Bluebeard and Me

1983 • 48 min • Israel

Based on the legend of Blue Beard written by French author Charles Perrault (1628-1703), in this film adaptation however, neither the original blood nor the original murder make an appearance. These elements are replaced by a poetic research on the awareness of the death of the murderer Bluebeard and the dead women are replaced by mannequins, sometimes dragged, pushed or transported; other times, they seem to take on a life of their own.

Jigsaw Feeling / New York Streets

1983 • 11 min

Footage of street life in the Bronx and Manhattan, with a continuous soundtrack of the constant crime statistics, and the recent Reagan invasion of Grenada (to fight the Cuban threat to American students and an airstrip). Interrupted with statistics about wealth inequality, and shoals of tropical fish (for respite). A grim 1983 report from ground zero in the evil empire.

Behave, Bernard!

1983 • 11 min

A bad dog learns to be good.

Sweet Dressing

1983 • 3 min • Germany

Within the soundscape of an anonymous station, only two black spots in motion suggest the bearing of two people. On a white screen gradually appear irregular dark shades which only later can be identified as clothes, dressed on virtually invisible woman and man. The aesthetic effect is conducted by over-exposure of the light tones (white walls and faces), letting only the dark clothes to signify human presence. The intimacy between a man and a woman is not overexposed by the act of undressing. In contrast, it is slightly implied by the gestures of dressing followed by fondly kissing for good bye and parting. Both silhouettes disappear, leaving the frame in different directions. Their closeness diffuses in the sound of of the station hall and strangers' voice…

The Banana Man

1983 • 28 min • United States of America

"This is my only truly solo video project. The tape is an exploration of character and was done in direct reaction to my performance work at the time, which was characterless. Video seemed a good way, by virtue of it not operating in 'real' time, of dealing with character and psychological motivation. 'The Banana Man' was a minor figure on a children's television show I watched in my youth. I, myself, never saw this performer. Everything I know about him was told to me by my friends. The Banana Man is an attempt at constructing the psychology of the character — problematized by the fact that the character is already a fictional one, and by the fact that none of my observations were direct ones."

Snow Movies

1983 • 8 min • United States of America

SNOW MOVIES (1983) was shot in the winter landscape of upstate New York and in snowbound Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have broken down the various purviews and scales to two dimensions with pixilation and framing. Phil S. says it is a capsulized version of the history of Western painting (I paraphrase).

Marias da Castanha

1983 • 30 min • Brazil

In Belem, brazilian Amazon, the brazil nuts women live in the Estrada Nova neighbourhood. They turn the brazilian fruit into a nasty commodity.

Flap

1983 • 3 min • United States of America

FLAP (1983) is a very direct approach to moviemaking. A 3x5 card waved in front of the line of a projector beam, shot from a perpendicular angle to the projector. A good old-fashioned light/shadow play.