All Films

An Angry Dog is a hand-held animation made from a Cracker Jack toy.

‘A cook can’t just mix things up’, says a woman with a typical Brooklyn accent while the camera shows sophisticated images from food and travel magazines. In this black-and-white video, her first in this format, Martha Rosler explores the relationship between gastronomy, class and breeding. A silhouetted woman hiding her face from the camera describes her efforts to improve her status and that of her family through gastronomy. With a deadpan voice and accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, the woman explains why she wants to become a gourmet. The text comes from one of Rosler’s ‘postcard novels’ entitled Budding Gourmet – also written in 1974 – in which in eleven chapters the artists tells the story in the first person of a woman wanting to learn haute cuisine to climb the social ladder.

The performance takes place in a small setting with an audience, but that's only a part of the artwork. After filming the performance he uses them again in installations where he is Miss Piggy or Heidi. And of course lots of ketchup, Mayonnaise and chocolate sauce.

Because of work commitments and the influence of Christian Missions, traditional mourning ceremonies among the Tiwi people of Melville Island were becoming rare at the time of making this film (1974). The full, elaborate ceremony, called the Pukumani ceremony, lasted several days and involved large numbers of people in ritual roles. It was performed here with full awareness that this may be one of the last times such a ceremony would be staged in the traditional way. The ceremony was prepared by the Mangatopi family of Snake Bay after the death of a 35-year old family member killed by his wife. The dead man’s father, Geoffrey Mangatopi, and his family requested this film to be made as a public record of a disappearing tradition. Unique to the Tiwi people of Melville and Bathurst islands, the Pukumani ceremony was not only performed to safe-guard the passage of the dead person into the spirit world, but to re-affirm kinship relationships and traditional Tiwi culture.

Short movie by Douglas Davis.

A remarkable film diary comprised of photographs of the protests at the Nihon University All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee (Nichidai Zenkyōtō) and film fragments depicting everyday life.

A chance meeting between the artist, ten young boys, and a yo-yo champion in a drugstore parking lot provides the substance for this rambling and anarchic filmed interview that at once parodies “man on the street” television interviews while introducing and sustaining an unusual but deliberate verite technique on its own.

This film centers on the construction of a traditional style house, their houses being not only very distinctive but also figuring prominently in religious ritual. The houses were rectangular and pole-framed, thatched with Miscanthus or bamboo-leaf; the doorway was protected by a skin or woven hanging and various parts of the house, such as the hearth and a window on the eastern side, would serve ceremonial purposes.

Nostalgia for the past. The film is about new relationships that undermine the traditions of the patriarchal village.

Viracocha features mestizos and campesinos in the Andean highlands interacting within a near-subsistance economic system. Market days and fiestas provide opportunities for Spanish-speaking mestizos, alternately benign and abusive, to assert their traditional social dominance over the Aymara and Quechua campesinos.

This film is my response to the epic tradition, from Homer to the Mahabharata–V. G. “This film reflects everything (Grauer) has been involved with in his previous films and he uses this knowledge in a highly personal and non-mechanical way. No matter how well previous type of 'flicker' film is done, they essentially remain machine-like and impersonal. In BOOK, Grauer extends his vision to encompass much more.... The totality of the experience is a kind of wrap-around poem... None of the parts exist by themselves, everything is interwoven to produce a strong and hypnotic unity."– Bob Cowan, in Take One

John Cleese was elected rector of St Andrews in 1970. Here, he walks about the university town, passing a few humorous comments on its institutions.

The result of a three year collaboration [1971-1974] between the Resolution film group and a number of community groups struggling to save their home and neighborhoods from "urban renewal". In San Francisco, as in most other cities, "urban renewal" means destroying minority and working class neighborhoods and building lucrative luxury developments. As usual, the key government people have been bought and paid for by the big developers. Redevelopment is a "tool" not in the "here's how to fix it" sense, but rather as an aid to understanding local issues in the larger contexts of the political-economy of the city and a variety of community organizing strategies. The film has been used and enthusiastically received by community and tenants' groups all over the country. It has proven itself as an effective means of stimulating discussion in the neighborhood and the classroom.

Two pumpkins.

Documentary outline about conscripts, their difficult military exercises in the Soviet army.

A film about a Ukrainian woman who was an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union. She bakes pirogi and speaks of her life. She was the cook at a popular Ukrainian cafeteria on the Lower East Side for years and later ran a boarding house on the Burlingham Road near Bloomingburg, New York. Music by the Penny Whistlers.

A being without a face goes through infinite stairsteps.

The film, shot ‘inside and outside’ Milan’s central station, uses this particular architecture as a model for discovering that within the environment we inhabit and work in, there almost never exists a relationship between space and its use. It pinpoints the ‘detachment’ which means expressing one’s own critical attitude towards the kind of architecture that refuses to accept any ‘vital’ aspects but reduces itself to a ‘monumental structure’ that is not able to contain the dynamics of human relationships.

Pál Schiffer's film reports on the injustices of the education system of the 1970s, the lies of the Kádár system, and the everyday life of Roma children.

First transmitted in 1974, this is a documentary about bomb disposal teams, their training, and the problems of maintaining a family life in one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. It follows three Ammunition Technical Officers in the British Army.

The Yemen Arab Republic, its people and their day-to-day activities, as discovered on a tour through town and country.

A campaign film supporting the dockers’ fight against redundancy, lay-offs and wage cuts caused by containerisation. The film charts the struggle against ruthless rationalisation, profiteering and land speculation, police harassment of pickets and finally the enforcement of the Industrial Relations Act by the arrest and jailing of the Pentonville 5. A series of massive solidarity demonstrations followed which freed the pickets and effectively destroyed the Act. The film includes footage of police harassment, dockers successfully calling on Fleet Street printworkers to strike in solidarity and the release of the five jailed dockers.

The collection consists of 2 cartoons: "Newlyweds". The story is about young spouses who, in pursuit of external comfort, lose both themselves and their love. "Portrait". The film is about a man who, in order to admire his photograph, destroys the house in which he lives.

With the singer/song-writer James Taylor (aka James McCandless), an extended music video set above and below Florida rivers, and in a ruined monastery. Features "You Shouldn't Have to Fell Such Pain" and other Taylor songs.