All Films

Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field

A documentary film about the (then) 76 year old American folk songwriter Malvina Reynolds. Through the film, viewers follow Malvina as she composes, records an album, performs in concert, rehearses with young musicians and manages her record and publishing companies. We get to see Malvina's attitudes towards aging and dying, her thoughts about romance and her ideas about social change.

TV Fighter (CAM-ERA-PLANE), 1977 plays with the experiences of real-time and the video copy, presenting in several iterations a fragment of World War II footage taken from the point of view of a fighter plane as it machine-guns targets on land and sea. Using a Russian-doll structure of images repeatedly rerecorded and reframed, Hall toys with the viewer’s manifold experiences of live and recorded time: the historical time of archival footage, the live experience of watching it on a screen, the déjà vu of watching that “live” footage again on another monitor. This nesting of recorded images within other recorded images implies an emergent sensibility in which the present moment is continually being recorded and reframed by audiovisual apparatus, but crucially Hall’s approach to this phenomenon is as playful as it is provocative. (artforum)

A study of sunlight refracted through drinking glasses.

Reflections of snow

This film illustrates the theory that a sudden change in climate caused by a stellar explosion resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A sacrifice ritual in Dahomey [Benin].

Following the 1975 West German Embassy siege in Stockholm, the German Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist Norbert Kröcher allegedly planned to kidnap Anna-Greta Leijon. The goal was to exchange Leijon for 8 of his comrades held in German prisons. The plan, known as Operation Leo, was intercepted by the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) and Kröcher and other team members was arrested on 31 March in Stockholm.

This film was conceived about 10 years ago when I heard Norman O. Brown define "Tragedy" as "goat-song" (or as Webster has it: "Greek tragoidia fr. tragos goat + aiedein to sing; prob. fr. the satyrs represented by the original chorus"). I disagree with the last part of the Webster explanation and tend to think that the quality of sound of goats crying did prompt the Greeks to choose this term for their drama. In any case, the film TRAGOEDIA is also ironic (thus, perhaps the Latin of its title) as often is goat "lamentation"; and finally I should quote this from O.E.D.: "As to the reason of the name many theories have been offered, some even disputing the connexion with 'goat.'"

An experimental short.

The collage of everyday impressions of social modernization; mixed cultures of old and new mediums, traditions and folklore…

The new kid in town must decide whether or not he wants to be friends with a social outcast.

The Komló settlement was a typical example of how Roma labour was exploited in the 1970s industrial mass production. This collaboration of Roma pupils and their teachers portrays the children’s everyday lives through their own drawings, often translating cruel facts into fairytales.

Railway tracks seen from a speeding train are converted into optical sounds.

One of a series of films that uses soundtracks generated directly from their own imagery. I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonics. – G.S.

Densité Optique I (Optical Density I) mark a chromatic decomposition of the image. The choice to show a scrolling film movie as an extreme slow motion, frame by frame voluntarily directs the gaze on the work of the image. This aesthetic can remember those photographs retouched by painting. However, this type of image is obtained by a chemical decomposition of the film emulsion. Indeed, it is composed of three colored layers deposited on a transparent plastic substrate. Light passing through these layers is tinged with the colors and optical density, recreates the images and colors of the frames. Certain mixtures of chemistries acids attack these layers in the decolorizer, diluting in different aspects.

A Creator of the Imaginary: Patrick Bokanowski

The artist speaks a word, which is quickly echoed in French, so that the words are only barely comprehended. Simple images — a bowl, a photograph of the ocean — appear and disappear.

I had the sudden urge to run through the forest while watching ATARAXIE I. Upon returning home, I went straight to my dictionary to look up the meaning of the title: “Tranquility of the soul. For the Stoics, a state of mind that nothing can disrupt: the ideal of the sage.” (Bernard WEIDMANN - RHIZOME HERETIQUE - March 3rd, 1980.)

The bloom of wild roses connects an aging soldier from a large country with a youthful soldier from a small country, but the two are soon parted as one of them becomes a casualty of war.