All Films

My Shelter

1981 • 9 min • Japan

Following on from Shelter (1981), the setting is again an air-raid shelter. Close-up images of trees are dissected and reformed abstractly. The film culminates with images of elderly survivors of the war in another example of Aihara’s unique blending of documentary storytelling with abstract illustration.

Talking Head

1981 • 3 min • United States of America

In Michel Auder's short video Talking Head, a young girl (presumably his daughter) is occupied with a plastic toy-package of some sort. She talks incessantly about 'a nothing-nothing'; 'a thing that never came back again…. everyone was mad about it and sad about it…but nothing ever happened'. Michel Auder, hiding behind a Yucca (or some such exotic plant), films the girl telling this story. She develops her 'story' circumventing and encompassing this nothing-thing, and she does it in a hypnotizing and repetitive way, like a mantra, using all the permutations possible with a minimum amount of words or facts.


Un Père Noël d'occasion

1981 • 31 min

With a touch of fantasy and a lot of ingenuity, this short fiction film presents the beginnings of a simple love story. Employed in the service of a department store, Pierre-Paul will become a Santa Claus to welcome children during the holiday season. This new job will mark the beginning of a charming adventure.

Ikuska 12: Euskal emakumeak

1981 • 11 min • Spain

Dialogue with four basque women on the situation of women in the early '80s in the Basque Country.

Video Blues

1981 • 23 min • France

Chutes de Souvenirs/Barcelone

1981 • 2 min • France, Spain

Outtakes from the movie

Pick Up Your Feet, The Double Dutch Show

1981 • 28 min

Skip Blumberg's film Pick Up Your Feet, The Double Dutch Show. This film first aired in 1981, on Channel 13 in New York. This film takes place at the Lincoln center (Fountain Plaza) in New York City. Skip Blumberg was always interested in motion including dance and the circus. He was selected as an artist in residence at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, where he produced Earle Murphy's Winter Olympics, which got him into sports for the first time. After making this film he wanted to make a film about a sport that wasn't well known. He decided to do a film on double Dutch. Blumberg grew up in an integrated community, so he wanted to do something that reminded him of growing up in New York City.

Pulcinella e il pesce magico

1981 • 9 min • Switzerland

Pulcinella is poor and tormented by his wife. But one day a magical fish bites his line and promises to satisfy his every desire if he lets him live. From that moment all the couple's dreams come true. Until due to too much greed...

The Cubist Painting

1981 • 49 min • France

Commissioned for the French television series Regards Entendus, La peinture cubiste is a multilayered, elusive investigation of the perception of reality and representation through cinema, painting and video. Unfolding as an evocative, implied fictional narrative, this work was suggested by a Jean Paulhan text in which a man experiences and perceives everyday life as though in the multifaceted space of a Cubist painting. Alternating between film and video, Kuntzel and Grandrieux explore physical and psychical perception, constructing an analogy between the way video transforms conventional filmic representation and the way Cubism fractured the perspectival codes of classical pictorial space. Shifting between abstraction and materiality, the real and the imaginary, this work suggests passages between painting, cinema and video.

Hikashu

1981 • 50 min

Documentary on Hikashu (ヒカシュー). A Japanese rock band led by pseudo-Kabuki vocalist, Makigami Koichi, known for their highly experimental music.

Millennia

1981 • 6 min

Layered electronic constructions acquire symbolic meaning in Millennia. -EAI

Locked In

1981 • 20 min

Face Concert

1981 • 12 min

Face Concert is an ode to human expression in which VanDerBeek transforms the face into a visual canvas.

Winter Li

1981 • 7 min • United States of America

"A black one-eyed cat -does he dream of summer and having two eyes? A faceless snowman thrives in winter's starkness. There is frost and winter light. A glass light-catcher radiates color. Passing trains. Flame and smoke rise from a barrel. Fragments of music. Somewhere someone is picking out phrases from Randall Thompson's 'Alleluia'. A lot goes on, but not much happens. It is winter. Finally the snowman announces the coming of spring, and the piano plays its closing chords." —Abbott Meader

Chronique Atopique

1981 • 7 min

The celestial monuments of Greece. A few blades of grass growing on the Parthenon pediment against a background of blue sky.

Waterloo

1981 • 46 min • Australia

The film outlines the history of the redevelopment of the Sydney suburb of Waterloo. Residents are interviewed and archival footage is used to outline the history of change in the area. The documentary emphasises the need for consultation and shows the results of more recent residents’ action groups.

Riots and Rumours of Riots

1981 • 34 min • United Kingdom

Radical resistance in the postwar British Caribbean community, from the 1948 Nationality Act to the 1958 Brixton riots.

Belmonte

1981 • 11 min

The film retraces the trajectory of Belmonte, considered one of the most important caricaturists in the country in the 1920s. It was in 1925, at Folha da Noite, that he created Juca Pato, a character that consecrated him. Belmonte did not spare the politicians and their ills, which made him persecuted by the Estado Novo.

Motel L

1981 • 3 min

From Morning till Evening

1981 • 20 min

Based in Stockholm Abelli Elander has been working as an artist since the 1970's. Her early works focus on contemporary gender issues, through a surreal visual language inspired by comics and pop culture in general. Apart from this little offbeat gem (directed by the Charlie Nykvist, son of the famous cinematographer) she has also brought her style to several movies as a costume and set designer. Among these are several films directed by Marie-Louise Ekman (most notably Mamma, pappa, barn and Barnförbjudet) and Håkan Alexandersson and Carl-Johan de Geer (Tvätten, Res aldrig på enkel biljett, Resa till havet).

Floterian – Hand Printings From a Film History

1981 • 12 min

Sequences from the filmmakers' 16mm, Super 8 and Stand 8 mm work, dating from 1960 onwards, are contact-printed onto 35mm film, then reduced to 16mm for projection. The relationship of the frame sizes of the smaller gauges to that of the 35mm causes a fluttering on the screen which relates to the ephemerality of the memory and the effect on it of the passing of times. Floterian is an old English word meaning fluttering.

Vernazza-Études

1981 • 7 min • France

Geography

1981 • 7 min • Japan

16mm to digital, 7'00

Bajado - Um Artista de Olinda

1981 • 12 min • Brazil

Life and work of the popular painter Bajado, interviews with Gilberto Freyre and João Câmara, scenes of daily life in the city that always inspired him.