Anno 1981 - 280

Outtakes from the movie

In 1935 photographer Willard Van Dyke moved to New York with the belief that films "could change the world" and began a new career as a filmmaker. His name soon became synonymous with social documentary in the U.S. His images of cottonfields, steelmills and industrial towns, and his portraits of unemployed factory workers and their families, provide an invaluable chronicle of those years and have become timeless examples of cinematic art. A candid portrait of a distinguished and outspoken man, this film includes conversations with colleagues Ralph Steiner, Joris Ivens and Donald Richie; footage of Edward Weston, his close friend and mentor; and many excerpts. It explores the dilemma of anyone with a social conscience who must face the harsh realities of earning a living while retaining their integrity. And it reveals a man in his seventies still determined to do good creative work.

A short film for school kids about the importance of sharing.

The Luggage comprises an array of intertwined scenes featuring activities with such props as a TV set, high-heeled shoes, mirror, torch. The film emanates physical tension, accentuated through dynamic editing and the aesthetics of compulsive repetition, characteristic of Sosnowski’s practice. It presents murky explorations, shaky scenes of convulsion, magic rituals with an undertone of eroticism.

Into my hands fell a 20-minute exhortation to find the right job after high school. Struck by its fierce redundancy, I undertook a distillation, editing the optical track, aiming for conversational cadence, choosing image only when silent. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

"Long live dynamic geometry, the movement of points, lines, surfaces, volumes ...." - Dziga Vertov Uses precisely (mathematically) determined single-framing to give movement to static space, to give life and energy to solid objects, to duplicate/mimic the eye's true movements, to forcefully bring to consciousness an inherent symmetry and balance in the visual field. Images: deadened railroad tracks, ice plant fields, Bethlehem Steel smokestack, Canyon Cinema office, back porch clouds and sky, PG&E plant at Moss Landing ....

The film wants to highlight a dream visions through a special film technique composing the colour images (like a colour photocopier at work) through red, green and blu excepts. Some sequences have colours that only add up two primary colours. in other sequences I use masks.

Mobiles works with regulated frame movements becoming increasingly more unpredictable : a controllable, closed space, in which more random and unrestrained movement are distributed. This device allows forms to be deployed by the movement, but is still untapped by narrative film: contracting and leaking spaces, crushed signs, decomposition of movements by other movements, dripping and corpuscular choreography. Mobiles is the result of a continuous tension between abstraction and reality. The same goes for the relationship between sound and image, which echo one another.

A homage to the 80s experimental cinema. A poetic play manifesto about this form of expression that at the moment had a huge development.

The theme of "David and Goliath" is varied through colors, structures and shades in a kind of workshop film. Collage-like graphic elements, materials and different fabrics are used to allow form, color and structure to be experienced in their correspondence to each other and to movement and music.

Stiff Little Fingers and U2 perform at a concert recorded in 1981 at Queen's University, Belfast, in front of the fans who had supported them from their early punk days.

Short 8mm experimental film.

After school special type short about illiterate high school students.

A stony-faced Tom Morton, General Manager of Doncaster Rugby League team, has just received a copy of the Guinness Book of Records. His team now has an entry for most games without a win. What follows in Barry Cockcroft’s wonderful portrait of the club’s last four fixtures of the 1981 season is a mixture of the bleak, the poignant and the hilarious. The scattered devoted few at the aptly named Tattersfield watch as Doncaster and Hull legend Tony Banham finally comes up trumps.

Margaret Hixon's 1981 film documents a real-life wedding in the Old Believer settlements of Marion County, Oregon, in the years 1979 and 1980. The film briefly touches on a wealth of traditional arts (embroidery, clothing construction, weaving, vernacular architecture, folk song and foodways) and beautifully presents a whole series of rituals -- the "devichnik" (engagement party), "selling" the bride and her braid, the wedding feast, the bargaining over the dowry, and the ceremony of bestowing gifts and advice on the newlyweds. In English and Russian with subtitles or voice-over translations.