All Films

A documentary on Chairman Mao and the Chinese communist revolution by Single Spark Films.

DIAGRAM FILM alternates shots of planes, cars and people walking with comically elaborate moving diagrams of them. And sometimes it reverses itself, as when a group of triangles is replaced by a shot of tepees. The diagrams head off into fantastic Rube Goldberg machine movements, with details undergoing constant transformation.

Gary Walkow shot this film in 1977 and completed it in 1978. In the August 1979 issue of "American Cinematographer" Tom Frei wrote an article "Moving Camera Shots inside a Moving Automobile." The entire film was shot inside of a Oldsmobile Starfire. Gary looped the entire soundtrack but now feels it would have been much better using the production sound. Oh, well.

Documentary about a school for kids from troubled homes.

Exploring the relationship between Aboriginal people and their land (including the Dreaming, sacred places), this film was inspired by Silas Roberts’ submission to the 1976 Australian Government inquiry on uranium mining - the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry. Silas, whose tribal name is Ngourladi, is an elder of the Allawa clan and was the first chairman of the Northern Land Council, established to assist Aboriginal people make land rights claims based on traditional ownership. The film, which moves from Arnhem Land in the north to Yuendumu in the centre, examines the importance of maintaining Aboriginal culture and laws and explains the reasons why they object to the mining being carried out.

Part of the larger filmic Four Journeys Into Mystic Time, in this work director Shirley Clarke makes use of a dancer’s body not only as the primary performer, but also as a canvas on which to paint projected images. Further enhanced by editing and effective use of shadows, the film is a transformative experience.

A decade and a half ago, poet Robert Kelly told me that the "crucial work" of our time might be what he calls "the dream work": I hope, with this Series, to have entertained his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous "dream" filmmaking. In homage to Sigmund Freud & Surrealism, this film proposes clear visual alternatives to the consideration of both "The Interpretation of..." and all previous representations of... dreaming. (SB) "These four short films...have each individually a haunting quality but do importantly work together to form a gradually swelling curve of increasingly intense unease." -Marie Nesthus

Light, clouds and fog.

The shadow of an opening door sweeps across the floor...

Via Sound is a string of vignettes from a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia. As the title implies, this film should be seen through listening. The Super 8 medium offered the exciting possibility of editing in-camera both sound and images simultaneously.

Rituals of performance, symbolic showdowns and murders of father figures, slaughterhouse parties, examinations of prejudice, gender and sexuality.

Đurđa lives deep in the forest in a woodcutters’ settlement. The only woman in this men’s world, she does the household chores for the entire community. A film about her work and her life.

This film is the most "plastic", the most "actionist" of Nedjar: it is his In contextus or his Double Labyrinth. Except that here - a single actor filmed in close-up on a plain black background. Nedjar "wiggles" his camera, with Gaël Badaud manipulating a green net or a mirror, wearing a gas mask or covering his head with a red-skinned knit like a bloody balaclava, he inaugurates a search for luminous calligraphies that will soon be shared with Teo Hernandez.-- Dominique Noguez.

Dubs is a somewhat abstract, experimental video without a clearly defined plot. It focusses mostly on the relationships between men and women and the lies they tell each other.

In this haunting performance, Wilke conflates the private and the public as autobiographical theater. The audience "eavesdrops" on a series of phone messages intended for Wilke, recorded from her answering machine. This voice-over litany of messages becomes an intimate if one-sided narrative of Wilke's life, a diary of personal and professional relationships — family, lovers, friends, colleagues — that is oddly elegiac. Wilke strips to reveal that her body is covered with the names of the individuals we have heard speaking; she then methodically removes the names until all traces have disappeared.

My first "real movie", which I started when I was a student, in 1978/79. An exploration / transformation of a mysterious house, black and white, with music by Couperin as indicated by the title. - Nick Collins

Freaky Raccoon gives safety tips

"ANGLE, with its brief black and white shots, almost always plunging and oblique, of naked bodies or parts of bodies, is a film of rupture. Punctuations of black primers break up the filmic continuity, isolating snapshots or brief furtive movements: the body rolling over itself, colliding with the other or falling (these terrible falls, as sharp as a fainting spell, like that of the hero of The Andalusian Dog, whose hand, as he falls, brushes for a moment against the naked back of a beautiful, insensitive woman, and which is, it seems to me, the most striking representation of the link between passion in love and death that can be given). Often these movements are repeated and the actors seem to be the descendants of Muybridge's bonshommes lost in a white room. At the end - this is the longest shot in the film - in a corner of the room, one of the two actors remains crouched, hiding his eyes in his hands. Then the corner reappears, empty."

Documentary by Hans-Dieter Grabe.

Yet another instructional short about seventies kids from California being prepared for emergencies.