All Films

Shoplifters: The Criminal Hordes

1983 • 15 min

This invaluable awareness film dramatizes common shoplifting techniques and demonstrates how clerks and store owners can detect and apprehend the thieves. Everyone pays when shoplifting isn’t aggressively prosecuted. Shoplifting has accounted for 30 percent of all business failures in the United States. As this program illustrates, the best defense against thieves is an informed and attentive staff.

Garfield on the Town

1983 • 24 min • United States of America

Garfield escapes from the car on a trip to the vet and finds the place where he grew up.

The Princess and the Moon

1983 • 25 min • Japan

Sachiko is unhappy and doesn't have a lot of energy. One day, a white rabbit appears and takes her to the "Land of the Moon." There, she meets her "true self," a happy and healthy girl, and Sachiko realizes she can be just like her.

Fala Mangueira!

1983 • 49 min

A documentary on the influence that carnival has on the daily life of the Mangueira hill in Rio de Janeiro. It follows the manufacture of the carnivals of 1981 and 1982, interviewing several residents who tell the story of more than half a century of the favela's existence and emphasizing its community importance and cultural, to the sound of the most beautiful sambas composed on Mangueira.

Jeff Keen Films

1983 • 36 min • United Kingdom

An engaging and enlightening documentary about Jeff Keen shown on Channel 4 in 1983. Features Keen performing in front of his film projections as well as talking about and showing his work in different media.

House of UnAmerican Activities

1983 • 17 min

"You are not fit to be a citizen of the United States," said a U.S. Representative to Werner Marx, German-Jewish refugee, distinguished sailor in the U.S. Navy during WWII, American Communist -- as he tried to have him de-naturalized in a hearing of the House Committee of UnAmerican Activities. House of UnAmerican Activities draws on a wealth of family archives (stills, home movies, documents, and a video interview with the filmmaker's mother), as the filmmaker searches for the father he never really knew and for the meaning of a troubled era.

City of Angels

1983 • 20 min • Thailand

Combining video, performance art, documentary, and tableau vivant, this short piece set in what appears to be part of the Ayutthaya Ruins in Bangkok, Thailand, begins with a panoramic shot of various Thai folks dressed in traditional garb and sleeping in the grass as a woman narrates. The rest of the piece is broken into six unbroken shots of these individuals in still poses depicting both some aspect of Thai life as well as suggesting its disquieting alienation from modernity, as the same woman narrator now sings. The final shot is again of the ensemble sleeping, suggesting that the previous montage was, indeed, a collective dream.

Rocking '83 - Bear's Jam

1983 • 33 min • United States of America

An incredible historic document showcasing the roots of Old School Hip Hop movement with all its disciplines involved: Djing, Mcing, Breakdancing, and Graffiti. Featured in the "NYC: Urban Image" show at MoMA PS1 1983.

A Postcard from Victoria

1983 • 14 min • Canada

Petites notes à propos du film 'Je vous salue, Marie'

1983 • 25 min • France

Notes on the inception and making of Hail Mary.

Courtship

1983 • 44 min • Soviet Union

A comic play revealing people's empty ambitions and meaningless principles.

Home Feeling: Struggle for a Community

1983 • 56 min • Canada

This feature documentary takes us to the heart of the Jane-Finch "Corridor" in the early 1980s. Covering six square blocks in Toronto's North York, the area readily evokes images of vandalism, high-density subsidized housing, racial tension, despair and crime. By focusing on the lives of several of the residents, many of them black or members of other visible minorities, the film provides a powerful view of a community that, contrary to its popular image, is working towards a more positive future.

Mr. Gloom

1983 • 3 min • United States of America

Think your life is terrible? Wait until it ends. God has a sense of humor after all--but you won't like it, when He finally gets tired of putting up with your nonsense. Bill Kopp's award winning short animation from Calarts, 1983

Esparazor

1983 • 53 min • Japan

A man, who gets superpowers after a scientific accident, has to face off against an old colleague who wants to control the earth.

It Is of Eden I Was Dreaming

1983 • 25 min

This film is an evocation of the life of the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, based on a series of paintings by Sidney Nolan. Rimbaud was always one of Nolan’s heroes. Over the years he painted many pictures of the poet. The famous artist responded enthusiastically to a suggestion by an Australian scriptwriter for a film about Rimbaud and he produced 31 large new paintings for this film together with many small crayon drawings. These works, interwoven with a wealth of drawings paintings, photographs and documents from the Louvre, the French National Library and the Rimbaud Museum at Charleville, have been combined in a filmic evocation of one of France’s most extraordinary writers.

Quartet for the End of Time

1983 • 23 min • Mexico

The story of a young man who lives alone in his house, and his indifference and solitude with the world around him.

Hunter and His Son

1983 • 10 min • Soviet Union

Young Saltyk follows the example of his father and learns to be brave in the fight against the evil monster that ruined his village. Based on Altai folk tales.

Cilla Black's Christmas Eve

1983 • 50 min • United Kingdom

Special featuring Cilla Black and her guests Frankie Howerd, Graham Fletcher, the Bee Gees, Julio Iglesias and George Benson.

Night and Dreams

1983 • 11 min • Germany

Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams) is the last television play written and directed by Samuel Beckett and broadcast on 19th May 1983. It is a wordless play, the only sound that of a male voice humming, then singing, from the last seven bars of Schubert’s lied Nacht und Träume, words by Matthäus Casimir von Collin: "Holde Träume, kehret wieder!" ("Sweet dreams, come back"). Schubert was a composer much loved by Beckett – "the composer who spoke most to him…whom he considered a friend in suffering" (Wiki) Beckett lists five elements that make up the play: evening light, the dreamer (A), his dreamt self (B), a pair of dreamt hands and the last seven bars of Schubert’s lied.

Gråtvalsen

1983 • 57 min • Sweden

"Crocodile tears" - Fellowship is replaced by suspicion and hatred in a Stockholm suburb. Wheelchair-bound retiree Hugo lives with his wife and his mentally unstable son.

The Black and the Green

1983 • 45 min • United Kingdom, United States of America

Explores the influence of the African American civil rights movement, both in philosophy and strategy, on the fight for Catholic independence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

So Far from India

1983 • 49 min • United States of America

Via the New York Times: "...film examines the marriage of Ashok Sheth and his wife, Hansa. Ashok moved to New York only days after the wedding, to a woman he barely knew; the match was arranged in the traditional way. Now Ashok sells magazines in a subway station at 116th Street, lives in a cell- sized apartment and cherishes his new freedom. The film follows Ashok through such American activities as a visit to a store that sells running shoes. Then it follows him back to India, where Hansa waits with a baby he has never seen, and with a great many questions as to her future. "

The Dylan Thomas Trail

1983 • 28 min • United Kingdom

Dylan Thomas is perceived as one of the greatest poets working in the English language in the 20th century. He lived in London, and spent time in America, but chose his home in West Wales, in the village of Laugharne. This video trails all his most regular haunts, including his aunt's farm Fern Hill, and the village of Laugharne.

Polka Dots and Moonbeams

1983 • 12 min

This tape is an attempt to focus on a few moments of the fractured, subjective experience of public sexual encounters – an evening spent in a nightclub.