All Films

Rusting World

1980 • 6 min • Canada

An allegorical film about the human condition with images that are similar to the art of Kandinsky or Klee and, closely combining surrealism and abstraction, prefigure a world that is becoming decline.

Second Thoughts

1980 • 18 min

GHOST DANCE LOTS OF FLARES THE BODY OF A WOMAN identified as lies under a blanket on fogs of san fran. small bits – J. K.

Wind & Water

1980 • 3 min • United Kingdom

Untitled: Silueta Series (Gunpowder Works)

1980 • 4 min

United States 1980, Super 8 transferred to digital, colour, silent, 4 min

Jesper

1980 • 13 min • Germany

Learning to see our surroundings

A Touch of Venus

1980 • 8 min • France

Fatehpur Sikri

1980 • 9 min • Germany

Not to See Again

1980 • 14 min • United Kingdom

Misrecognitions and simulacra. An anti-montage film: a series of discrete shots that nevertheless gel at one or two points to produce simple meanings. Hovering on the line between abstraction and representation, the film hopes to problematize them both. According to Peter Gidal, “the abstract quality (never total, for the objects are always recognizable as objects) helps Hamlyn to negotiate sexual imagery as it occurs in the film by rendering those images relatively abstract and on a par with other objects depicted. The effect is to drain the image [of the naked body] of its conventional sexual meanings and associations (with pornography, for instance) and instead neutralize it almost.”

Returning

1980 • 7 min • United Kingdom

Looking outside and looking back in the same moment; the collision of memory and reluctance. In Returning Susan Stein achieves a simultaneous sense of identification and displacement by filming from the ‘inside out’ – a subjective camera places us inside a house, behind a door, peering through blinds – and from the ‘outside in’ through a voice-over whose broken streams of memory describes ‘her’: “Fragments – she arranged them as moments to be watched.” Filmed in black and white, it is though we were invited into the shadowy area of our own fragmentation, our own sense of stopping and starting.

South Africa Belongs to Us

1980 • 55 min

The story of the lives of five ordinary black South African women living under the apartheid system, secretly shot with the help of journalist Nomavenda Mathiane, also featuring interviews with Fatima Meer and for the first time, Winnie Mandela

zoku-SHINPU

1980 • 3 min • Japan

Erotic Trilogy

1980 • 13 min • United States of America

Costumed Capers...Fetish and Fantasy...Punk Pleasure...a must for those who enjoy erotic humor.

Urban Spaces

1980 • 27 min • Australia

“A totally artificial city created entirely in camera. There is virtually no sky…just a city gone mad and town planning berserk. Crazy angles created by a tilted camera are mirrored and enhanced by dutifully askew mattes which mock the architectural logic of urban space. Shadows and wind generated by the city’s structures defy pedestrians as the soundtrack (an insistent sine-wave) aggravates and reverberates off heavy geometric facades.” (Paul Winkler)

Time 2

1980 • 3 min • Yugoslavia

A recording of a clock ticking for 3 minutes.

Suddenly Once More

1980 • 2 min

The multiple identities of Professor Anatole Lacoste.

Light in the West: Photographers of the American Frontier 1860-1880

1980 • 59 min

When photography was in its infancy, the American West was still a frontier; and, for a period of about fifty years, the two interacted in a complex and fascinating way. Dramatic subject matter in the West became accessible to photographers just when the newly-discovered wet-plate process enabled them to work outdoors.

Ballœillades

1980 • 14 min • France

Deaf/Punk

1980 • 8 min • United States of America

Richard Gaikowski chronicles punk rock band The Offs' performing at San Francisco's notorious "Deaf Club"

Moody Teenager

1980 • 7 min • United States of America

A teenager's quest for a new look leads to a new personality. Music by Suicide, The Andrew Sisters, James White & The Blacks, Los Microwaves.

Fade Out Ii

1980 • 9 min • Japan

Short film by Itaru Kato

The Units’ Training Film

1980 • 13 min

The Units’ Training Film was a visual backdrop for this groundbreaking punk-syntho band.

Waiting for Harry

1980 • 57 min

Djunawunya, Arnhem Land, east of the town of Maningrida, July 1978. Frank Gurrmanamana is responsible for preparing the final mortuary ceremonies for his brother who had died six years before. The brother had been buried in Maningrida, but now his remains are being brought back to his home country. Central to the ceremonies is Harry Diama, the senior blood-relative of the deceased man, but Harry lives in Maningrida and is pre-occupied with a pending court-case there involving his son. He is needed to approve each step of the preparations, and is also pivotal in bringing other people to the event, including "men of importance" for the dancing. As the day for the ceremony's climax draws near, Frank grows ever more anxious about the non-arrival of Harry and the people he is supposed to bring.

Remy/Grand Central: Trains and Boats and Planes

1980 • 5 min

Commissioned by Remy Martin for a public exhibition in Grand Central Station in New York, Remy/Grand Central is an advertisement with a deconstructive twist. In a syncopated collage of appropriated footage (including a TV commercial for Sergio Valente jeans) and a young woman drinking Remy on a commuter train platform, Birnbaum calls attention to how mass media advertising uses a woman's body as a vehicle for selling products. In a stylized pastiche that she terms "a snack-en-route with a pretty girl, animated trains, updated Bacharach muzak (Brazilian style), and pouring Remy," Birnbaum turns the tables on the media's use of woman as commodity.

Invasion of the Aluminum People

1980 • 30 min

"Shot in murky black and white with a super-aggressive, super-nervous, super-8 trigger finger, INVASION is a DEVOesque time machine collapsing 50's lobotomization on 70's ecological blight to breed a future race of broiler foil mummies. Virgil, the hero, follows a path that parallels Kevin McCarthy's in the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, but Boone's blithe disregard for linear continuity produces a more divinely spacey comedia than Hollywood ever imagines." – Amy Taubin, SoHo News