All Films

Going Home Sketchbook

1975 • 3 min • United States of America

Reflecting on this deconstructed family portrait, Beams writes, “This film taught me a lot about Time, as I rotoscoped my family at our summer cottage in Indiana. I was at MacDowell during a cold and dreary fall. The hours I spent tracing my loved ones as they sat in the sunlight gave me a powerful tool for grabbing onto happiness. I came out of the summer-light Indiana trance into a chilly rainy New Hampshire autumn, ready to head back to dinner in the dark, and I felt as though I had been with my family all day, in the best place we all enjoyed together. It seemed as though, by spending hours drawing a few short moments in their lives, I could extend their time and mine on this earth. I felt I had control in providing more time to them by drawing more frames than each frame of original film.”

Cartoons: New York State Primaries

1975 • 6 min • United States of America

New York State Primaries shows stenciled lettering that dissolve between the words, “red,” “blue,” and “green” but don’t create secondary colors. The film is a response to Saul Levine’s 1972 NOTE: CHICAGO REDS AND BLUES.

Elaine Dart, Not Like Other People

1975 • 14 min

This documentary shows Elaine Dart's success in dealing with cerebral palsy. Through perseverance and patience, she learns to use her feet to accomplish such intricate tasks as threading a needle, stringing beads, and knitting.

30 Sound Situations

1975 • 10 min • Poland

30 Sound Situations is a performance which maps the acoustic properties of numerous divergent environments. In each situation, the artist stands in front of the camera (at various distances) and claps two pieces of wood against one another with sweeping gestures. The resulting sounds relate directly to the presented spaces, including: classroom, library, staircase, woodshop, backyard, and park, among others. Waśko taps into various sound effects in order to examine the potential for creating a new representation of space in film.

Light Shaft

1975 • 8 min

"Light Shaft" diagonally crosses the screen with a wedged light formation, usually on the diagonal. Its variations are rendered through arrangements of the tripod while panning the camera. Limiting the viewer's attention to a smaller screen, a point in space, allows for a certain confusion as to whether the rest of the (dark) screen blends itself into the surrounding blackness or is just a window into it.

Catch

1975 • 4 min

"Catch is a fragmented observation on hidden reflective surfaces, the corner of a dormant television screen, a window..." —Mike Reynolds

Screentest

1975 • 20 min

A fragmented cinematic portrait of nine talented amateur actors and mimes. A candid look at an unusually gifted group of avant garde artists coming together to experience and share each other's art. These gifted artists have made more than 75 8mm films themselves. Then as now, they did all the costumes, sets and make-up and created and acted all the roles. Featuring: Herman Costa, Noel Levert, Adolph Garza, Albert Elia, Stephen Cervantes, Ronald Koladzie, Phillip Haight, Pedro Barrios and Richard Hartenstein.

Restoring the Appearance to Order in 12 Minutes

1975 • 10 min

16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. The filmmaker performs her solitary act of cleaning. A static camera tightly frames the studio sink, dirty with paint and other residue while the artist engages in a concerted ritual of scrubbing and scraping … a treatise on the over-cleanliness of certain reductivist gestures in history of art making. (1975)

Le Cinéma

1975 • 5 min • Japan

After directing Kami Eiga (Paper Movie in 1972, which used paper film), I ended up with a dead track with Kanko Eiga (Sightseeing Movie of 1973). Ideas no longer arose. I realized that I needed a fresh start to make films, and I thought that carefully studying the object that is a second, the most basic unit of time, would allow me to do things again, to find a new way of living. That's why it can be called an exercise. It's a film in which I say to myself: it's a film; that's how the second is, that's what happens when a photogram is over. When the twenty-four photograms are passed, the film is finished. I had fun making this movie. It is a film for which nothing knows anything about the cinema or begins to study it. It tells us what the film is, and how it is done.

Media Burn

1975 • 23 min

Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collision of two of America's most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco's Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the "ultimate media event." In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a "Phantom Dream Car"—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets.

Pearls of the Persian Gulf: Dubai 1975

1975 • 43 min

Hara Factory Workers' Struggle

1975 • 52 min

Documentary about the harassment of striking garment factory workers in the city of Nakon Pathom, Thailand.

Rituals for a Still Life

1975 • 25 min

A stunning graphic composition of form and surface, Rituals for a Still Life links Gillette's video and collage work. Here he constructs a series of enigmatic collages that have as their background a television monitor showing his videotapes. Gillette builds a tension between static objects and the moving video images, both in the deliberate ambiguity of scale, and in the way these images flatten the video image. Meditative yet charged, these collages reveal surface abstraction rarely achieved in video.

Buraco da Comadre

1975 • 9 min • Brazil

Documentary short focusing on the people of a poor São Paulo neighborhood, whose lives are made difficult by a large hole on the ground that the government won't fix.

In the Beginning

1975 • 60 min

Sir Kenneth Clark discusses Egypt and the Nile Valley. Shows him traveling there and pointing out the ways in which Egypt flourished as an early civilization. Presents the art and architecture of that early time.

Cutting Light and Dark Holes

1975 • 8 min

Cutting Light and Dark Holes, like Overlapping Planes, works with the flatness of the film plane against the spatial depth of a situation. The film, entirely in negative image, begins with a black sheet of paper filling the frame. Haxton enters from the left and cuts four rectangles in the paper, two on the left and two on the right, leaving four white rectangles. He then removes the black sheet by rolling it off from left to right, revealing four black rectangles underneath, cut out of a sheet of white paper. He rolls this paper from left to right,leaving the frame black again. The surface looks identical to the black frame at the beginning of the film: as in Overlapping Planes, there is no way of differentiating between the appearances of flatness without signs of activity within the space.

Conversation avec Henri Langlois

1975 • 22 min • France

Henri Langlois, interviewed in the Cinema Museum at the Palais de Chaillot, talks about his vision of cinema's past, present and future, before a brief jaunt through the museum as it was in 1975.

Apparent Motion

1975 • 28 min • United States of America

The images for this project were first obtained by enlarging, with an optical printer, frames of evenly distributed grain particles from a black and white strip of underexposed 8mm Tri-X film. The resulting 16mm black and white Plus-X copy was again blown up with an optical printer to make a negative on high contrast stock.

Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire

1975 • 57 min • Ireland

A group of unruly Irish stage actors refuse the orders of their British director as he orchestrates a dramatic retelling of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-century keen about the the life and death of Irish rebel Art Ó Laoghaire.

Un naufrage s'offrait

1975 • 7 min • France

Union

1975 • 8 min • United States of America

Union is one translation of the meaning of the word "yoga." The work is an allegorical journey of the self seeking reunion with itself.

Which Century Is Outside, Children

1975 • 9 min • Yugoslavia

A story about a Macedonian village that lives its last days with the last inhabitant, an old man, a witness to all the events that make the history of the village.

Variations

1975 • 5 min • Yugoslavia

A short film composed of shots of the sea surface.

Studies in Image (de) Generation

1975 • 10 min

"These three films are derived from "Negative / Positive on Three Images" by Baldwin Spencer, which was copied in high-contrast material to make Study No. 1. This, in turn, was copied into the same material to make Study No. 2 serially. . Then Study No 2 was used as the material to copy Study No 3, copied again in high contrast material. Each copy had more and more contrast, until in the third there was nothing gray left in the image. As a result, the original action is progressively replaced by the action of the cinematographic material. These three films together, in addition to the first two Baldwin Spencer films, were used in our film / performance piece that we did in 1977 Edges of Meaning, in which we examined some of the implications of the material."