All Films

Karkatir K

1980 • 4 min

A comedic Iraqi cartoon about the war with Iran.

The Vampire Strikes Back

1980 • 12 min

A bloodthirsty vampire satisfying his most odious desires.

I fantasmi del fallo

1980 • 55 min

Made as part of the series on sexuality and costume entitled The Unconscious and its Rituals, the documentary is dedicated to pornographic cinema, which is analyzed and discovered through the exposure of its production.

Aedniku suvi

1980 • 15 min • Soviet Union, Estonia

Gardener Arnold Treumuth's life in the summertime expresses the ups and downs of amateur gardeners during the 1970s in Estonia. The documentary is a continuation to Vello Aruoja's documentary "Gardener's Spring".

Number 20: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten

1980 • 28 min

In 1980, Harry Smith combined his two Wizard of Oz-related films (FILM NO. 16 and 19) and called the new work FILM NO. 20: FRAGMENTS OF A FAITH FORGOTTEN. The film was to premiere accompanied by a live score at an Anthology fundraising event at Alice Tully Hall, but, unfortunately, the event was canceled and it never screened. – Anthology Film Archives

Kursha Became Proud

1980 • 9 min • Soviet Union

A dog helps many people and is thanked by all, but this may cause problems too.

Old House

1980 • 26 min

The Chen Family Residence “Chen Sì-yù” in Xiushui Township, Changhua, was built in 1846 (the 26th year of the Daoguang reign, Qing dynasty). Designed by craftsmen from Tangshan and constructed using stone from Mount Wuyi, the residence features a symmetrical and meticulously crafted layout. The “Wénkuí” plaque above the main entrance serves as a moral exhortation to future generations, bearing witness to the Chen ancestors’ journey across the strait from Fujian to Taiwan.

Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution

1980 • 40 min • Australia

In an attempt to solve the mystery, Stephen Knight concluded that five women-Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly-were murdered in 1888 to cover up a secret marriage between Prince Albert Victor, and Annie Elizabeth Crook, a working class Irish Catholic girl. Knight's main source, Joseph Gorman (Annie Crook's grandson, Walter Sickert's self-proclaimed son with Annie's daughter Alice Margaret Crook), later retracted the story and admitted to the press that it was a hoax.

¿Qué es?

1980 • 9 min • Chile, Cuba

Confused faces of children, women and men when asked about the meaning of “eviction”, “unemployment”, “begging”, “gambling” and “racial discrimination”, all problems eradicated in Cuba after the 1959 Revolution. Survey filmed in Havana between May 2 and 13, 1980.

For the War to End, the Walls Should Have Crumbled

1980 • 52 min

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne profile a former electrical worker and his involvement in the production and distribution of an underground workers’ rights newspaper within his factory that led to his termination in the brothers’ early experimental TV documentary.

Ab morgen wird sich alles ändern

1980 • 56 min • Austria

Warm summer afternoons, concentrated on a group of young women and men on a weekend in the small town of Wels, form the setting for Andreas Gruber's diploma film, which was shot at the Vienna Film Academy and exclusively with amateur actors. The film primarily tells stories of adolescence, the basic tenor of which is already revealed in the film's title, through poses staged with attention to detail. The soundtrack provides the driving narrative force, not only expressing feelings and hopes, but also elegantly capturing a mood defined by waiting, while simultaneously archiving it.

Mon sang pécheur ruisselle ardent

1980 • 11 min • France

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Time Smoking a Picture

1980 • 38 min

In Time Smoking a Picture, simple gestures and images — a figure smoking a cigarette, a frame within a frame — unfold in time as elusive manifestations of reality and representation, transformed by barely perceptible variations of shifting color and passages of light. Raymond Bellour has written of Kuntzel's achievement in "representing the unrepresentable: the spatial or temporal in-between created by the disjunction/conjunction between mental representation and perception, surface and depth... past and present, conscious and unconscious. As the hero — the author and original spectator — establishes his presence, crossing the room in both frames at once, we are given the outline of what representation holds out to fiction: the hero's gaze into the window, where he can see his life slipping past, inside and outside."

Commentary

1980 • 1 min

“Made just before Around & About, this work is something of a ‘manifesto in jest’ against television…. I’m a sit-in viewer looking slightly up at the screen making simple gestures into the camera. The mood is ambiguous as I seem to be watching a mirror, covering my face, reaching out to the camera, obstructing my head with a harsh (interrogator’s) lamp, and maybe more. The image, distorted through a fisheye lens, gives the impression of a concave monitor, as if the whole act were seen through a peephole or pinhole camera. In some sense I ‘play’ both sides of the screen—performer and viewer attempting to ‘connect’ either way. As ‘commentary’ it’s two-way, making it also a commentary on commentary.”

Black/White/Text

1980 • 7 min

Using the phenomenon of inverted (or negative) video feedback, this work constructs a one-to-one correspondence between recited text and image. Black and white rectangles, embedded one within another against a black background, are generated through a closed-circuit system: a camera’s signal is inverted and displayed on a monitor that the same camera is framing. The camera, as it were, sees itself seeing itself seeing itself and so on. (It’s the inversion itself that produces the alternating black and white rectangles). The number of rectangles is based on a precise score involving seven channels of chanted text (all in the voice of the artist)—a kind of “language canon.”

Snuden 3 - Snuden vender hjem

1980 • 18 min • Denmark

Snuden decides to leave the big city and return to his green bog.

Estuary

1980 • 55 min • United Kingdom

Estuary was made during the three weeks between December 17th 1979 and January 6th 1980. The film was shot from a small cabin boat moored near the mouth of the Keyhaven river. This is a place known to me since my childhood and the location for several paintings, films and photographic pieces. The camera was fixed relative to the motion of the boat as it responded to the action of wind and tide. This resulted in an intermittent scanning of 360 degrees about the central axis provided by the mooring, and a periodic vertical motion of about eight feet due to the rise and fall of the tide. A four second section of the film was exposed every fifteen minutes between dawn and dusk.

Aagaman

1980 • 20 min • India

To the city come men, women, fruits, flowers, vegetables, goats and sheep – all ready for consumption. It is the process of consumption/exploitation that forms the core of the film.

Sweet Love Remembered

1980 • 14 min • Canada

Inspired by remarks made by Freud, "Eros nowhere makes its intentions more clear than in the desire to make two things one." and by Nietzsche, "What must these people have suffered to have become this beautiful."

A General Has Been Taken Prisoner

1980 • 52 min • Albania

During the summer a two groups of children are spending time playing a war game.

Kurash

1980 • 10 min • Soviet Union

How a grandfather helped his grandson in the folk wrestling "Kurash".

Trace

1980 • 1 min • Canada

The memory of a nearly perfect evening.

Last Afternoon

1980 • 5 min

Short parody of black film whose male hero meets a mysterious lady who turns out to be his destiny, of course. Unlike black film, where action defines structure, here the actions of the characters are more enigmatic because they are subject to the filmic structure. Décor: the "Trou" des Halles, the passage Molière, the rue aux Ours, the square des Blancs-Manteaux.

Roman Numeral: IX

1980 • 3 min

This is the most absolute. – S.B.