All Films

Short film in the Delta Space Mission film series. A intergalactic research ship descends onto an unknown planet where the animals are reminiscent of Earth's distant past when it was populated by dinosaurs.

The animation is about a dog, which has her inherent hunting instincts awaken, even though she lives in an ordinary apartment high-rise building. One day, her dreams come true and she plays the role of a hunter. Here it turns out that it was not what she had imagined. Now there is only the joy of returning to the family home.

Part 1 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein" (for Laurence Rickels)

Part 2 of "3 Miniatures after Melanie Klein"

A visit with a master of the Oldest Art In The World: tattooing. Disabled by arthritis since the age of four, confined to a wheelchair, his growth stunted, Stoney St. Clair joined the circus at 15 as a sword swallower. A year later he took up tattooing, and traveled with circuses and carnivals for fifty years practicing his craft. As we watch him at work, we see the determination which led Stoney to use his crippled hands in an art where mistakes are permanent, and we realize Stoney has overcome his handicap to heal himself and others with the magic of symbols. The film ends with a visit by New Age tattoo master Don Ed Hardy, who receives a permanent souvenir by Old School tattoo master Stoney.

A cinematic narrative about the lives of emotionally hurt children whose destinies have brought them to the school for students with special educational needs.

Set in the late 1970s in North Chicago, 3725 traces the obsessions of a Japanese foreign student with the traditional Japanese toy kendama, jazz, and drugs, for an abstract portrait of Japanese culture’s transformation and the disastrous explosion of an individual’s inner life in the US.

An amateur short film about a guy who ends up watching over a detonation button.

A man and a woman awake in the middle of the night. The woman is upset by her dreams and what she perceives as the untouchable nature of her mind, unlike the physical nature of her body. The man recounts the story of his youth – when he was not allowed to go out to play, his mind would go outside instead. An elliptical series of scenes unfold as though in the mind of the man – an encounter with an epileptic, a prostitute, and a demented therapist - all somehow address the mind/body schism. A school film written and completed in two weeks, incorporating preliminary image manipulation techniques via the use of contact printing and Mettler’s first use of sound montage in a musical sense.

Sid Perou follows the attempt of climbing Europe's highest and most extreme rock face, the Troll Wall in Norway, using free climbing methods. The documentary features Hans Christian Dossieth, Colin Brooks, Steve Bancroft, Chris Gibb and Sid Perou.

Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with poet Hannah Weiner. Child tells us, "The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations and subordination." This tape serves as a pre-conscious preface to the parts that follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined.

Refugee Road follows a Cambodian family from a refugee camp on the Thai/Cambodian border through their first year of resettlement in the United States. This occurred during the era of "The Killing Fields." The film is ultimately a celebration of the rich mosaic of American society.

Centenary of the death of Alexandre Herculano.

In 1980, Wolfgang E. Struck, artistic director of the Berlin Friedrichstadt-Palast, wistfully considers the imminent demolition of his house due to structural deficiencies. Employees rhapsodise about working at this historical stage, where international stars like Louis Armstrong and Juliette Gréco performed. Nearby, construction of the new Friedrichstadt-Palast is starting.

Dammbeck relocates the Leipzig-based artists' circle known as Herbstsalon to La Sarraz Palace in Switzerland, which in 1929 was the venue of the legendary congress held by important protagonists of new, independent cinema as a forum to discuss issues such as elitist thinking, the taste of the masses, and the difference between art and life. One participant was the avant-garde filmmaker Walter Ruttman, who had already begun to produce abstract films for advertising purposes at a time when his co-pioneers Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter were still preoccupied with painting. All the same, Ruttman placed his talent at the disposal of Nazi propagandists during the Third Reich. Dammbeck reflects upon the durability of the notion we term avant garde by vacillating it between the extremes of Modernism and anti-modernism. Hommage à La Sarraz was at the core of the film footage deployed in Dammbeck's 'Hercules Media Collage' of 1984/85.

Experimental documentary about the baroque school of music that flourished in Minas Gerais, hinterland of Brazil in the eighteenth century, formed mostly by mulatto musicians. Original baroque music and electronic music by Arthur Omar.

The first documentary directed by Maria del Carmen de Lara, together with feminist producer, scriptwriter and director Maria Eugenia Tamés. A direct cinema experience, based on research on the harsh reality of sex workers in Mexico at the time. Testimonies from several women, who have different life paths, but share the violence to which they’re exposed: precariousness, prison, mistreatment, discrimination and dehumanisation.

A simple meal of meticulously photographed ingredients with gruesome close-ups.

About a lazy bear cub who was taught to work by his friends.

A trip inside a Steel Valley workers’ magazine, which looks like raw material for a Bruce Springsteen song.

Originally aired in 1981 and later virtually lost for decades, Sound Business is a UK-produced documentary about two British sound systems, the legendary (and at the time already 18 years-established) Sir Coxsone Outernational and the (then) up-and-coming Lion Charge, both based in SW London.

A landscape that has been filmed once is projected onto a screen and then filmed again. The re-shot screen changes with the sound of quick beats. An unremarkable local landscape. Roads stretching through rice paddies, clusters of telephone poles, wooden houses with large eaves. These landscapes are transformed into a blur of memory for the purpose of reshooting. The electrically produced noise-like acoustics and the sound of beating quislings beat the landscape out of the memory circuits of the brain. For a moment, a girl stands in front of a screen of landscape, and the landscape rotates around her. The whole work is more than an idea, including the composition in which the synthesis of a kind of screen process brings about change.

“For many years I had wanted to visit the Rock, but I had never really had the means. A little funding from Germany finally got me there. I had read a lot about the history and mythology of the Rock and of the Aboriginal people, but I was only too aware that I, as a European, could never hope to get into or feel that mythology. So I decided to make a film about it from my perspective. I cut out all these mythological figures…lizards, emus, wallabies…some of them from drawings in caves on the Rock, and carefully employed them as mattes for footage I shot in real time. In those days hotels were very close to Ayers Rock [now known as Uluru], so I never had to go very far with my camera. I used filters and telephoto lenses to suggest a kind of unknowable aura…to show that there was truly something out there on that flat plain.” (Paul Winkler)