All Films

The music is by composer Jean-Yves Bosseur. Film made from the work of Albert Ayme: 16 AND 1 VARIATIONS, made in 1963. The film is a series of variations of variations. Albert Ayme: "Each variation generates a new structure, each one is autonomous and treated like a stony runaway". So I analyzed each work, found its own structure, traveled the opposite path of the painter, materializing the different stages, using cutouts of transparent paper, creating inside each structure found new phases, new variations, with the help of which I was able to develop the film sequences.

A parody on the post urban devastation wasteland film with a slant on 'rectangular' thought patterns in which a little girl recites from Marx's Communist Manifesto between two cardboard cut out trees and Alfa, the last man on earth to read and write (improvised by Yehuda Safran), is interviewed on TV (improvised by painter Jock McFadyen); with cameo performances by Alexe Sayle eating a Chelsea bun, David Medalla and Oriel de Quadras in non-sensical conversation and Giles Leaman consming reams of rectangular text.

Appropriating material from the introduction to the nightly television show, PM Magazine and a commercial for Wang Computers, Birnbaum uses enlarged still-frames from each of the sources to compound a new image of the indelible American Dream. To the soundtrack of an acid rock version of The Doors' L.A. Woman, repetitive images of an ice skater, baton twirler, cheerleader, and young girls licking ice cream, exemplify dominant cultural images of women — images that emphasize their performative nature: the idea that woman is a spectacle arranged for the (male) viewer's pleasure. The culimination of a series of works from 1978-82 dealing directly with television imagery and ideology, this tape is one of four channels shown simmultaneously in Birnbaum's installation at Documenta 9, in 1982.

"The former is one that reminded me of Méliès, with its simple but profoundly affecting special effects, such as a shadow puppet-like model of a ship being carried against well-lit backgrounds; Bruns renders the artlessness artful, and his modest ambitions exude the purity of early cinema. " - Karen Sachs

Stiff Little Fingers perform hits live at the Rockpalast festival in Durtmund, Germany in 1980

My favorite of the program is BED DESERT (5 min, silent), which is something of an outlier. In this inventive little film, the ripples of bed sheets are juxtaposed with images of the desert (or are they?), the formal ruse playful and intriguing. -Karen Sachs

More evocations of this style are evident in the shorter film THE POET AND THE POND (6 min, sound), an amalgam of patterns and repetitions that also bring to mind both the disciplined litanies of Marcel Duchamp and the surreal dreamscapes of Salvador Dali. (Scharres indicated in her piece that Bruns “is largely unfamiliar with the tradition into which his work clearly falls,” making all these comparisons, hers and mine, thought-provoking. How is it that an artist can so fully exude his own style that seems to be the product of certain influences, but isn’t?) -Karen Sachs

In stark opposition to the rest of the program’s surreality are the documentary-esque BINGO (6 min, silent) and DUCK (3 min, silent), the subjects of which are more or less aligned with their titles. -Karen Sachs

Influenced by Italian neorealism and by the social environment of the heroes: ruins, landscapes, Khrushchev-apartment houses rising on the outskirts of the Vilnius.

THE UNUSUAL BOOK is more thoughtfully stylized in its depiction of a living book featuring a woman’s face on and around which things happen, including delightfully crude animations utilizing paint, fabric and random oddities. -Karen Sachs

"Based on Icelandic landscape, EARTH SAGA reveals the powerful beauty of a land formed by volcanic explosion. From steaming lava ash to moss-covered fields, the film redefines color and black and white images, superimposing abstract and surreal visions of nature. Original shooting was done in both 16mm and Super 8mm enabling the filmmaker to alter the inherent texture of the compositions through optical printing techniques of extending sequences, re-framing and superimposing. The resulting footage forms new flowing and rhythmic patterns in an illusionistic translation of landscape. The film is to be preceded by the reading of the poem 'Earth Saga' which was written at the time of the shooting. A copy is enclosed with the film." - RS

A documentary short telling about Salah Abdel Karim the scrap artist.

The Watts Summer Festival is one of the oldest African American cultural festivals in the United States. The Watts community founded the event in 1966, one year after the Watts uprising. Ulysses Jenkins's film captures moments from the festival, including footage from a performance by the band War. This California funk band—famous for songs such as "Low Rider," "The Cisco Kid," and "Why Can't We Be Friends?"—was also well known for its multiethnic membership. The 1972 Watts Festival was one of the first events that Jenkins filmed, and he captured the underlying issues of community and commemoration that defined the annual event. At the time the local news media would, in Jenkins's opinion, misrepresent the festival by issuing warnings about it, and the artist's own footage served to counteract the media's negative view.

Film - transformed reality as light on the screen.

A visit to a Romanian disco where the rhythms of songs like Iko Iko and Invisible Sun interweave with. The edited footage from dance floors, concert halls, and stages is a multi-channel remix of the original recorded material with the filmmaker’s edited appropriated documentary footage.

Using the steel of a woman's face and eyes as a basic motif, the surprising world created by the free relationship between one frame and the next is amplified by the violent collision of unintelligible female voices, etc., and directly affects our perception. The film is not theatrical, literary, or pictorial, but aims to be cinematic, and is never tied up in real-time and space, and for this reason, it has an interest not found in tested and unerring films, and not found in traditionally accepted and conventional films.

One day at a high school, the headteacher suddenly announces that a draft is to be imposed at the morning assembly. The headteacher suddenly announces that there will be a draft. The idea that a school is like a nation and that one must have the military power to protect one's own school could be a satire for the sake of satire, but as in the episode where the principal is a Chiba native, the term Chiba native is used as if it were a racial term. The film maintains the quality of the gags that generate laughter, as in the episode where the school principal uses the word "Chiba-kenjin" as if it were a racial slur, making it an excellent comedy.

The war has been going on for some time. Every day, Take Five, a guard protecting the deserted border district of Firebird, sits alone by his radio. It doesn't matter to him what's going on in the war front. His daily routine is to enjoy a game of radio poker with his unknown colleague on the other end of the radio. Marina, a young girl who vaguely believes in the happiness of the phantom city, comes to the border to board a refugee ship bound for Shanghai. However, her future is crushed by a ruthless gunshot... Fear and a sense of danger in a controlled society where dreams, hopes, and cravings for freedom lead to death. The hard-boiled narrative, which telegraphs the need to lament, is very stylish and wonderful.

A melodramatic love fairy tale about a man and a woman in love who are separated after graduating from high school, one in Tokyo and the other in Nagoya. They search for each other amid various incidents such as incest, unemployment, and an encounter with a celestial maiden. The story is a melodramatic love fairy tale. The dialogues, tools, and ideas are all deliberately fake, but the fact that the entire film is dedicated to this makes it even more compelling. The space-fantasy ending is also enjoyable, as the nymph who fails to separate the two lovers and win the man bursts her beloved earth like a balloon, and the two become the creatures of a new planet. The original theme song by the two in a musical duet over the scenery of the new planet at the end is a highlight of the film.

A friend's face illuminated by a bare bulb. A breakfast table. A woman taking a photograph. A woman's face as she smokes a cigarette. A woman in a nightgown. A dinner table at night. A scene from a car window. A naked woman tying her hair in front of a mirror. A woman frolicking in the sea. A woman drinking alcohol at night... As the title suggests, this work is made up of fragments of images that the artist took with his camera from time to time during this period. The material is limited to the artist's surroundings and the people around him, and the people are aware that they are being filmed, looking at the camera or smiling at the camera... In other words, they are looking at the artist behind the camera or smiling at the artist. The film records the gaze of the artist as well as the gaze directed at the artist. This is a valuable work that makes full use of the advantages of 8mm home movies.

Two girls walk down a snowy street on their way home from school. They are residents of "Mahoroba," a place hugged by mountains and sheltered by snow. Winter, the girl in the grey coat, freezes her fingers in the falling snow to make a cold white tower. The girl in the yellow coat, Spring, is staring at her from a little distance. The winter girl in love with the snow is forever innocent. She will remain closed and eventually die. The girl in spring is saddened by this and destroys the winter girl's "mahoroba". The winter girl learns that she cannot resist the changing seasons. The day of adulthood is coming, but the innocence of Winter's youth prevents her from degrading herself, even to the point of death. The spring girl hugs the winter girl's shoulder. The colour of red blood can be seen through the cheeks of the girls. This is the beautiful myth of the girl's misery. Mahoroba, caged in the snow, will eventually be forgotten one day. Somewhere, the birds of spring are singing.

From the introductory narration to the title backdrop where Sayuri Yoshinaga sings, "A cute bud becomes a flower, and even after the flower falls, the truth remains. This is the intro to the song where the three completely different moods are perfectly connected. The girl buries a sunflower seed and a doll called "my baby" together in the ground and takes revenge on the other young man. In spite of this, the screenplay is not at all realistic or tragic, which amplifies the cruelty of the fairy tale. The cruelty of the story is amplified.

Based on a novel by Akagi Motoko; a physiological literary world written by a 20-year-old woman for a radio drama. While a girl misses the last train and spends the night in a phone booth, the words she speaks into the empty receiver impress us with her pregnant tenderness rather than the sadness of her separation from him. Gradually, as we see the gaps in her life, the death of her twin sister when she was a child, her desire to be independent from her mother, and the fact that she really misses him, the movement of images becomes the movement of emotions. The phone booth that is supposed to protect her from the rain looks like a womb, but it is actually cold. When she realizes this, the morning arrives.

Snares and worms live inside a pinhole camera. The film follows their narrative as they dream about everything. The camera, which has no lens, greedily shakes its head and tries to collect all the light in the world. Suna is not satisfied with the light that comes through the pinhole, but wants to turn his own eyes into a pinhole, and wants a landscape that is directly burned into his brain.