All Films

Behold Hawaii

1983 • 39 min

Amid beautiful island scenery, a young Hawaiian searches the past for his cultural roots.

The Monkey Fishing

1983 • 17 min • China

Four monkeys learn from people and try fishing in different ways.

Echo

1983 • 20 min • Soviet Union

Reflections on the moral values that develop in a person during school years. The author tells about his former school in Mazsalaca.

Beirut! Not Enough Death to Go Round

1983 • 57 min • Canada, Lebanon

A moving and graphic portrait of the people of wartorn Beirut in their day-to-day struggle to survive in the rubble and despair. Filmed shortly after the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Chatila, the film gives a vivid picture of the plight of these people and of any people who are too poor to escape the ravages of war.

Corporeal

1983 • 21 min • Australia

An experimental work about the Australian forests by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.

A Favour

1983 • 11 min • Soviet Union

Mistress Hen has a lot of worries every day. She needs to feed the chickens, take them to kindergarten, clean, iron, and prepare dinner. But how to cook something without salt? Hen goes to the neighbor Goose to borrow salt, but she asks to do her a favour. A simple request triggers a whole cascade of favours that must be arranged to get...salt. The cartoon satirically mirrors the rampant barter and blat in the poor Soviet society of the late "stagnation" era.

La cage

1983 • 20 min • Canada

La Cage seems to be divided into two parts: a homosexual writer visualises his fantasies and a collective joins what seems to be the story of an encounter between two men.

Without Your Interpretation

1983 • 14 min • United States of America

This performance took place in 1983 at the Art Dock on Center Street in Los Angeles. Like much of Jenkins's other work, it involved multiple performers, including Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi. Here Jenkins addresses social and geopolitical issues—specifically the "insensitivity of middle-class attitudes towards the Third World"—often using an invented language referred to as "doggereal." Jenkins confronts Americans' indifference to events outside their own country, particularly to crises and need in poorer nations.

Cake Walk

1983 • 26 min • United States of America

This video documents Cake Walk, an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant's pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), at its second (downtown) location on Franklin Street. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance which developed in the mid-eighteenth century among enslaved African Americans as, among other things, a way to covertly ridicule slaveholders. The dancers in Cake Walk move amid Conwill's sculptures and paintings, one of Conwill's cosmograms painted on the floor beneath them.

The Human Face of the Pacific: The Marshall Islands. Living with the Bomb

1983 • 25 min • Australia

The people of the Bikini Atoll were removed from their homelands as a result of American testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific. They now live on another island, dependent on American food and support. They can never go back to Bikini Atoll because it is poisoned beyond the possibility of habitation. This film is a poignant, impressive study of a people whose culture has been vanquished.

たそがれの終わりごろ

1983 • 52 min • Japan

A boy in blue wanders along a riverside wearing a kettle, a raccoon piggy bank and an electric stand.

Za fisuto: Ken o nomikome

1983 • 58 min • Japan

The Seaside

1983 • 28 min

Documentary about the town of Walton-on-the-Naze, directed by Adam Curtis

Jyanken Play

1983 • 3 min • Japan

Experimental short by Keiji Aiuchi.

Strange Tangents

1983 • 23 min • United States of America

A short film that deals with the strange and the supernatural. This film features a stop-motion newt, created and animated by Mr. Chorvinsky.

Reagan's Nightmare

1983 • 6 min

If Frankenstein's Monster is to the dark side of science, King Kong is to the Great Depression, Alien Invaders (like The Blob and The Thing) is to the Communist Threat, Godzilla is to the bomb, and The Milpitas Monster and Hedorah the Smog Monster are to pollution. Now, this robotic dinosaur made of various technological devices from Japan is to Japanese consumerism and possibly globalization!

Alamanya

1983 • 5 min • Germany

A photo film about the living situations of Turkish workers and their families in Germany.

Frankenstein (I Swear on My Mother's Eyes) The True Story

1983 • 57 min • United States of America

A shot-on-video straight-to-television comedy adaptation of the Frankenstein story. Co-written by, and starring Gary Cohen (director of Video Violence).

Family Snapshots

1983 • 7 min • Romania

Time passes by quickly for a young, small family: soon it will no longer be that small, the children grow up, the parents get older, and this reality in constant motion, erased and diffused, sometimes stops itself in front of the camera.

Blood Dreams

1983 • 30 min

People of a small town are having the same nightmares in this SOV short. The morning after, someone is always found dead.

Kaychi

1983 • 18 min • Soviet Union

Kaichi is the name of the storyteller of Altai folk kyuis, which praise the beauty and strength of the inhabitants of Gorny Altai, who carefully preserve their cultural heritage. A poetic story about the beauty of the nature of Gorny Altai and its people.

Dead Relatives

1983 • 5 min

Shot in Nunhead Cemetery, South East London with Heilco Van der Ploeug and Leila McMillan. Designed to run as a super 8 projection for the performances that we were making in and around London as BEING KARNAL. Music BEING KARNAL (Heilco Van der Ploeug and Andrew Kotting)

Gunfight U.S.A

1983 • 60 min

In this documentary, FRONTLINE tries to pierce the debate on the explosive issue of handgun control.

Il cantico dei cantici

1983 • 18 min

Preserved and digitized by the National Film and Business Archive