All Films

An illegal immigrant has a hard time

A dazzling, inventive, and rarely-screened fairy tale from the feminist artist.

Rosler uses the format of a cooking demonstration (as in Semiotics of the Kitchen) to address cultural transaction--the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Reading directly from a West Bend Electric Wok instruction booklet, Rosler wryly comments upon the Oriental mystique conjured by the West Bend manufacturers, a mystique evoked and then "improved" upon through Western technology--i.e. non-stick surfaces and electric power. Drawing attention to the choice of the color red on the wok, Rosler, in typical deadpan fashion, raises the bogeyman of Communist China, holding up a pamphlet of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and saying, "Remember this guy?"

Our visual field is dominated by gossamer layers that become distorted in fluid motion, break off, begin anew and continually change color. As we continue looking, they break down into seemingly amorphous constructions. We see details, textures and patterns from curtains, whose form responds to air movements and whose color alters through manipulation. Through or behind the veil-like fabric we can make out plants. As our gaze is increasingly directed outwards, we momentarily discern trees, branches, twigs and undergrowth before they vanish into electronic interferences. Hill uses video shots of these motifs as a basis for his artistic experiments in electronic alienation, overriding the colors and tone values to such an extent that the recorded structures become distorted and dissolve beyond the limits of their identifiability.

A study of the face of a man ruined by alcohol. His difficult experiences and age are well-visible. A round mark on the forehead, deep furrows, lack of symmetry of facial features. The melancholy trumpet theme is accompanied by a continuous, disturbing sound.

A free adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar. The musical, shot in the Atacama Desert, transfers the action to the context of the indigenous peoples of the Andes and uses arrangements made with musical instruments typical of the region.

A young man is feeling sick inside his house, which is also home to several rabbits. Based on short stories from Julio Cortazar's Bestiario.

Short film by Hollis Frampton

Tongpan is a 1977 Thai 16 mm black-and-white docudrama that re-creates a seminar that took place in Northeast Thailand in 1975 to discuss the proposed Pa-Mong Dam on the Mekong. Interwoven are sequences depicting a poor farmer, Tongpan, who had lost his land to another dam some years before, and his struggles to make ends meet.

My first film (San Francisco, 1975) was Porter Springs, an exalted home movie shot on summer vacation in the North Georgia mountains at a place I have spent every August of my life including the month before I was born. The next summer I shot Porter Spring 2 (1976), focusing more formally on a few of the elements presented in the first film, and the following summer I made Porter Spring 3 (1977), my most “painterly” work, basically one image: reflections of trees on the lake broken by a line of waterlillies, an hallucinatory love poem (“elegant and serene experience” --Pat O’Neill).

Étienne Dinet (إتيان دينيه), born March 28, 1861 in Paris, where he died on December 24, 1929, was a French painter and lithographer. He was one of the leading representatives of Orientalist painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Obtaining a scholarship in 1884, Dinet undertook his first trip to southern Algeria in the region of Bou-Saâda, the Naili culture having a profound impact on him, as he would return there many times until he settled in his first Algerian studio in Biskra in 1900. In 1905, he bought a house in Bou-Saâda to spend three-quarters of the year there. In 1907, on his advice, the Villa Abd-el-Tif was created in Algiers, modeled on the Villa Medici in Rome. Having lived much of his life in Algeria, he called himself Nasreddine Dinet (نصر الدين ديني) after converting to Islam. On January 12, 1930, he was buried in the Bou-Saâda cemetery, where a museum that houses many of his works bears his name.

The first fashion film in history, produced in 1977 to launch the first Fendi Ready to Wear collection, Histoire D'Eau tells of a young woman vacationing in Rome and bathing in the city fountains.

First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural artifacts–which could be schematized as East/West, socialism/capitalism, propaganda/entertainment, as well as image/sound–and see how they reverberated. In other words, I wanted to make an essay out of things, as well as a communist musical. But the question arose–what was the ideology of such film play? Is MISSION TO MONGO aestheticized politics or political art? –J. H.

By combining a journey to the locations for Eisenstein’s unfinished opus Que Viva Mexico! with images of an Indian girl walking, Carasco has created a cinematic topos across multiple historical eras. We see figures walking, marching, in motion, as we set out on the trail of a film, and of the Tarahumara – those who run fast.

An ordinary middle class suburban couple sees a celebrity parrot on TV who supposedly foretells the future. The parrot predicts the world is coming to an end. The couple are initially shocked, and then decide to make the most of the time they have left. They get dressed up and decide to celebrate as if it was New Year's Eve, since the world is supposed to end at midnight. On TV, it is shown that all the important people of the world are selected and sent to the moon in a space ship so they can escape the earth's destruction. As midnight approaches the couple gamely prepares to toast their demise, but midnight comes and the world doesn't end. A special comes on TV and the parrot explains he made a mistake. As he starts to correct himself, the moon blows up. All of the scenes on TV are animated cartoons. The scenes with the husband and wife are filmed live actors.

Two men go to Warsaw to sell Christmas trees and meet old friends.

This film is about the Moroccan Jews who have come to Québec since 1956. It explodes the myth of Jewish unity, showing the Moroccans caught between the Ashkenazy Jews, English-speaking and long established, and the French-speaking Québécois. The film asks whether the Sephardic Jew can be Jewish and Québécois at the same time.

Science fiction story often read as an allegory for the disappearance of children under the Uruguayan dictatorship.

"The Heavens"–Symmetrical chaos envelops a lone, topless man, whose symmetrical abstractions conjure up a psychadelic version of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man.

People from the future conjure these two ghosts from the past, who fade back into the past as the film ends. Here, Karl Marx and John D. Rockefeller debate their philosophies of private versus public ownership, free versus regulated markets, revolutionary versus evolutionary change.

In 1976 an anarchist exiled in Paris returned to Spain. He feels disappointed, comparing the anarchism of Barcelona in 1936 and the situation of Western democracy today. it is the story of 'a long night' that ends, a night that he understands as dictatorship and repression. A night in which ideas, sensations and memories intermingle.

This educational film teaches how to manage the tension and pressures of everyday living.

An animated fable for children showing that things can be malignant or benign depending on how they are used--with good or evil intent.