All Films

The Destructors

1983 • 12 min • United Kingdom

Punk rebellion and anarchy with Peterborough-based punk band The Destructors, six years after their formation. Born in the crucible of punk's genesis in 1977, the band are just beginning to make a name for themselves in the early 1980s.

Ein halbes Leben

1983 • 5 min

"A HALF LIFE stands on the threshold between the genres of documentary and experimental film.The film attempts to distill the experience of many years to five minutes, taking stock of the bedroom of an elderly middle-class couple. As an expression of the relationship of this couple, its way of life becomes the room the symptom and symbol of a generation. Everything's in place, peaceful but largely frozen." (Christine Noll Brinckmann)

Guimauve et baisers bleus

1983 • 7 min • France

From the rushes of a black and white TV show, we can illustrate subjective feelings of the cineast. An obvious aesthetical concern is noticeable from the accuracy of chisellings. The use of acid and colored ink and felt-pen, offer effects of portrait and of stylized writing. Rhythms are punctuated by humoristic references from character’s portraits.

La Lune est mauve

1983 • 14 min • United States of America

Chutes de Feuilles d’été

1983 • 25 min • France

Toxic Shock

1983 • 3 min

A visceral personal response to surviving a near-fatal case of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Toxic Shock combines intimate taboos of needles, blood and tampons with tried and true hands-on self-defense, set to a spare, penetrating and unknown score provided by a cassette tape gifted by a forgotten friend. A call to arms; what will you do in defense of your body? "Penetration up the wazoo, blood, fire, gas, needles, tampons, liquid power and cocktails of the burning sort. My experimental response to sweating out near death with Toxic Shock Syndrome." --Vanessa Renwick

Shadow Stepping

1983 • 14 min • Japan

I filmed the video as if playing with shadows, listening to the birds singing on the top of a small hill and feeling the height of the sky from the sound of airplanes passing overhead. I filmed and edited the video in three parts. I came up with the next video from the first edited video and filmed the second video, and then came up with the third video from the second edited video. It took me a year to complete it, but it felt like a year of struggling to write a haiku. I used natural sounds recorded live on location without editing, but it was strange how they somehow matched the edited footage as if they were calculated.

Taking a Line for a Walk: A Homage to the Work of Paul Klee

1983 • 11 min • United Kingdom

Tribute to the work of Paul Klee, Taking a Line For a Walk is an exploration and expansion of the Swiss painter's ideas on color and movement, funded by Channel Four and the Scottish Arts Council in 1983. An astonishing journey modeled and guided along lines from which cities, vast universes, aquatic worlds and ghostly individuals emerge until the lines become the heartbeat of a dialysis machine, uniform and terminal.

Winter Last July

1983 • 13 min

"I travelled to Australia in 1979 as artist-in-residence to a Brisbane art gallery screening Canadian experimental film. I was handed a bunch of 16mm film and set about recording visual experiences. At the same time I had access to a recording facility and a grand piano. A couple of years later the two experiences merged into a personal travelogue that was part happenstance and part pre-ordained." –RM

The Promise

1983 • 38 min • Sweden

The young Greek filmmaker Menelaos Carayannis made some films for the Film Works before returning to Athens and establishing himself as a documentary filmmaker. The promise is an unassuming but poignant short film about a Greek family in Stockholm and about the double loyalties of the exile situation: Will they return to Greece or stay in the new country?

Red in Blue Letters

1983 • 13 min

Currey's Red in Blue Letters weaves images recorded by the filmmaker from contrasting settings into a delightful and mysterious conundrum of rhyming forms and colors

Lupita D'Alessio; hoy voy a cambiar

1983 • 45 min • Mexico

Mexican feature film

Emmanuel; si ese tiempo pudiera volver

1983 • 46 min • Mexico

Mexican feature film

Los secretos de José José

1983 • 50 min • Mexico

Mexican feature film

If She Grows Up Gay

1983 • 23 min

A blue collar African American mother talks about her pregnancy and raising her daughter with her lesbian lover.

So Much I Want to Say

1983 • 7 min • Canada

The video So Much I Want to Say consists of a series of still images, changing every eight seconds, which show the artist's face in close-up with a pair of male hands gagging her mouth and preventing her from speaking. Meanwhile her voice on the sound-track repeats over and over the words of the title.

White Throne

1983 • 7 min

Shot on Super-8, this short film depicts a post-apocalyptic cult worshiping a toilet bowl, in a cheeky, cautionary tale of nuclear holocaust.

Etiologie Ebouleuse

1983 • 6 min

Something happens in the relationship between two images if they are removed and reunited simultaneously. The passage of time also causes a kind of gap. More precisely, it is a film about shadow and light and about a series of actions.

Womb with a View

1983 • 41 min

The nine months of the filmmaker's pregnancy constructed as a serio-comic fractured nine-chapter narrative, from conception to birth, emphasizing the constantly changing transitional state of embodiment of pregnancy.

What Goes On

1983 • 9 min

In the Sky's Wild Noise

1983 • 28 min • Guyana

In the Sky's Wild Noise is based around an interview with Walter Rodney, the renowned Guyanese historian, author and political activist, who was assassinated in 1980. The interview-which was filmed in 1976, when the Victor Jara Collective were shooting their first documentary, The Terror and The Time-is intercut with archival footage, and explores the political, social, and economic conditions of the working class in Guyana in the 1970s.

Khoja Nasreddin II

1983 • 9 min • Soviet Union

Mary Manic's Decorum

1983 • 2 min • Canada

A man and a woman attempt to start a conversation with a third person. A spinoff of Spanghew Decorum.

Mall City

1983 • 48 min • United States of America

In 1983, a crew of young, DIY documentarians visited Long Island's Roosevelt Field Mall to study mall culture. This is Mall City.