Sena 1981 - 280

Exploiting the painterly 'smear' quality of undercranked 6 fps projected S-8: Shadow hunts, I follow. - Gary Adlestein

"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.

"Untoward Ends, along with Dead End, Dead End and Endless are a kind of cross between diaries and structural films and span the main part of my career working in 16mm. These were not happy years for me and they are not happy films. They were all conceived as silent films and I was very consciously working out my ideas about visual rhythm and visual/musical form. When I had them transferred to digital I had the opportunity to see how they would work as sound films - How hard would it be to compose musical tracks for them that would complement their spirit without detracting from their purity as silent film compositions? I had lots of fun in the process and have learned a great deal from them about the interaction between the two modalities as kinds of musical expression. I will leave it to others to decide if they are successful or not." -DB

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.

Joy Unspeakable is an ethnographic film that examines the question, what does it mean to be Pentecostal, through the documentation of three types of Oneness Pentecostal services in Southern Indiana: a gospel-rock concert, a regular Sunday service, and a camp meeting. Religious behavior, doctrine, and social values are discussed by several Oneness Pentecostal church members and ministers in interviews interspersed with footage of the various services.

An early "walking" performance shot on super-8 in 1981.

Produced by Carol Munday Lawrence as part of the seven-part "Were You There" series

Two brothers do laundry at a laundry mat. The older brother goes out to smoke and a policeman searches him and handcuffs him for finding a swithcblade. When the boy fights back the officer takes out his gun to shoot him. The younger brother pulls a gun for the officer’s partner’s belt and shoots the cop before he can shoot his brother. The younger brother is then put in the squad car. The film has little dialogue and has an African drum beat for a track.

A frightening vignette about violence and hatred in American society.