All Films

Luma nocturna

1974 • 4 min

Directed by Dennis Pies.

At the Academy

1974 • 5 min • United Kingdom

A found-footage film made entirely from Academy leader, which is normally used to cue the start of films. The film was hand-printed on a home-made contact printer. It was rolled back and re-printed several times over, to create a complex layering of both image and sound.

Night of the Seal

1974 • 41 min • France

In La Nuit du Phoque ("The Night of the Seal") they "decided to try everything imaginable"; the 41 minutes are packed to the brim with wild and utterly incomprehensible visual and textual shifts, including special effects, graphic but sensual love scenes, a hilarious Busby Berkeley-style "revolutionary ballet", a superb avant-garde gay cabaret number sung by Philippe Danton – imagine a cross between Rocky Horror and the Trout Mask era Magic Band – and any number of absurd cameos (I particularly like the surprise appearance of Sir Isaac Newton, who scares the shit out of some kids playing in a local park). As a period piece La Nuit du Phoque is unbeatable, and it alone would make an impressive bonus.

Analytical Studies III - Color Frame Passages

1974 • 22 min

The film consists of seven sections: the first section, "Specimen I," a "flicker" film, is the subject for the other sections of ANALYTICAL STUDIES III. ... "Specimen I," as with most of my other works, also exists as a "Frozen Film Frame," wherein the entire footage of the film is cut into strips and aligned serially between sheets of clear plexiglas.

Flower Fields

1974 • 4 min

"This short film was intended to create a colour field painting based on the flower fields that provided the living for so many, mostly undocumented, workers in the area. When the camera closes in on the beautiful colour-striped hillside, the laborers in the field can be seen. Later, in a run up Highway 5, we see the immigration police at their mobile roadblock."

A Voyage on the North Sea

1974 • 4 min • Belgium

Marcel Broodthaers’ film and book, both titled A Voyage on the North Sea which were distributed together as part and parcel of the same publishing plot. The ostensibly related subject of both book and film consists mutually of 19th and 20th century nautical images including: 1. photographic reproductions and details of an amateur’s 19th century painting of a fleet of fishing ships and 2. photographs of a contemporary sailboat.

Vanessa

1974 • 6 min • Argentina

In documentary fashion, drag queens are shown preparing for a performance, of which clips are also shown.

The Matter

1974 • 4 min

The image and sound are being simultaneously generated from a single source, which at the same time shapes the visual pattern as well as electronic sound of the resulting signal. The potential of the Scan Processor enables the modification of the shape and scale of geometrical patterns, resulting in the creation of a new kind of "image behavior".

Splitting

1974 • 11 min

For his 'Splitting' project, Matta-Clark found a house in Englewood, NJ (322 Humphrey Street to be precise) set for demolition, and bisected it neatly down the middle. Half-documentation, half-exploration: Splitting shows the laborious process and heady result- a house split completely in two.

Moving On

1974 • 57 min • Australia

Moving On is a 1974 Australian film about a sheep farmer George Collier who moves to a county town. It was made by Film Australia to help draw attention to the problems the rural poor.

A Man Called "Bee"

1974 • 44 min • Brazil, United States of America

One of the few ethnographic films in which the anthropologist appears as one of the subjects - a lively introduction to the nature of fieldwork. Napoleon Chagnon, who lived among the Yanomamo for 36 months over a period of eight years, is shown in various roles as "fieldworker": entering a village armed with arrows and adorned with feathers; sharing coffee with the shaman Dedeheiwa who recounts the myth of fire; dispensing eyedrops to a baby and accepting in turn a shaman's cure for his own illness; collecting voluminous genealogies; making tapes, maps, Polaroid photos; and attempting to analyze such patterns as Yąnomamö village fission, migration, and aggression.

Noctiluca

1974 • 3 min • United States of America

Otherwise known as Magellan's Toys #1. Hollis Frampton's "Noctiluca" was a film designed to be shown on the second day of the Magellan cycle, the filmmaker's unfinished magnum opus work. The title (nox/luceo) means something that shines by night, i.e., the moon, and the film indeed consists of a bright sphere, sometimes white, sometimes tinted, sometimes single, sometimes doubled and overlapped.

Cycles

1974 • 10 min

Cycles brings together 16mm film with Stephen Beck’s Direct Video Synthesizer imagery via a proprietary process Beck referred to as “editation.” Beck also composed the soundtrack to the film, which is made of one sequence repeated 12 times, with both artists contributing variations on each pass.

Focii

1974 • 9 min • United Kingdom

A woman dances and mimes, her stark white image moves across a red floor, reflected in a fractured wall of mirrors. As she performs, her mirror image gradually assumes an autonomous identity so that what was a central relationship of self to self has become one self to other. Focii not only explores the construction of self, and the dynamics of self and other, but also the interaction between the viewer’s body and the body onscreen, raising questions on the nature of identification in cinema.

Underscan

1974 • 9 min

In Underscan, time and the visual image are compressed. A series of photographs of my Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, MA had been videotaped, and re-videotaped while being underscanned. (The underscanning device is a structural framework particular only to video; it compresses the picture so that the edges can be seen precisely; it does away with the variation that occurs between monitors in the amount of the image which is visible.) Because of this underscanning process, each static photo image, as it appears, changes from regular to elongated to compressed or vice versa. Excerpts from letters from my aunt spanning 10 years are condensed into 8 minutes of my voice-over audio. Certain yearly occurrences repeat in an auditory rhythm, coinciding with the cycle of yearly changes.

Frosty Pattern

1974 • 5 min • Soviet Union

How Morozik decorated a rainy day with sparkling snow.

Chuchulucos y arrumacos para burgueses

1974 • 16 min

1974 Mexican experimental film

Disturbances

1974 • 11 min

Disturbances extends Jonas' investigation of mirrored surfaces and spaces, as she explores reflections of movement and images in water. The tape begins with Jonas, like Narcissus, leaning over a reflecting pool. Throughout this lyrical exercise, the viewer sees only reflected images and inversions, disturbances of the water's surface. Figures walking at the edge of the pool are seen as abstracted shimmers, upside down and backwards; shadowy figures move underwater and swim through the pool as in a choreographed dance. This simply rendered, evocative work is a phenomenological study of reflection, as Jonas draws a parallel between the spatial and mirroring effects of water and video.

Luz Externa

1974 • 31 min

"Luz Externa was one of the most ambitious productions of the Mexican super 8. The script is based on the monologue of Ernesto, a jipiteca machín, who tells a friend of his mystical adventures with his girlfriend [...] What was probably the super 8 film that best portrayed the countercultural world of the first half of the seventies in Mexico was not seen in its time, despite the expectation that its filming caused in the press." - Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, El Cine Súper 8 en México

Animals Running

1974 • 21 min

A continuous stream of animals from bison to splinters of fishes. "[A] serenely beautiful... study of animal life in continual movement - bees swarming, birds in flight, deer running. Photographed in high-contrast black and white, ANIMALS RUNNING is like a series of engravings come to life and its sense of delicacy is heightened by what sounds like rippling xylophone sounds." -Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times.

The Struggle of the Meat

1974 • 3 min

When I was editing my last film, ANIMALS RUNNING, a collection of images grouped themselves together but refused to be included in the film. I spliced them together and put them aside. At the same time I was experimenting with sound loops, inspired by John Lilly's work with dolphin language. Briefly, he discovered that when exposed to a repeating loop in a relaxed atmosphere, a subject would begin to hear sounds or words other than those recorded. I made some loops and found that the phrase "the struggle of the meat" was a particularly evocative one.

Memories of Prince Albert Hunt

1974 • 29 min • United States of America

Relatives of the Texan fiddler Archie "Prince" Albert Hunt tell stories of his life and untimely death.

Naim and Jabar

1974 • 50 min • United States of America

The hopes, fears, and aspirations of adolescence are expressed in the close friendship of two Afghan boys. As their acceptance of the filmmakers leads them to express their feelings more and more openly, the film grows rich in fact and themes of universal concern. Filmed in the Balkh Province, an area inhabited by Tajik and other Central Asian peoples. The town of Aq Kupruk is approximately 320 miles northwest of Kabul.

Moving Up to Amateur Radio

1974 • 12 min • United States of America

Short film designed to introduce CB oeprators during the '70s to the wonders of Amateur Radio