Of Special Merit (1968)

Dr. Benchley is addressing the Ladies Club on the subject of the reproductive habits of the polyp, a small aquatic organism. Although he is not able to display his live specimens, he has prepared a series of pictures of his subjects. He explains that the subject is made more complicated by the fact that polyps are able to change their sex from time to time. Then he presents some of the pictures of his specimens and the experiments that he has done with them. (IMDb)

A bold and unsettling short film that combines mysteriously striking images, on-screen captions, and computer-generated speech narration.

Filmed in Buchenwald, Dachau and Ohrdruf by "Allied Cameramen" there is no information about the director of the film.

Totems of destruction and desire. An operation on the combustible urges in a junk black mass. A swiftly-sliced nightmare of history and erotic autobiography.

In this film, Paul Tomkowicz, Polish-born Canadian, talks about his job and his life in Canada. He compares his new life in the city of Winnipeg to the life he knew in Poland, marvelling at the freedom Canadians enjoy. In winter the rail-switches on streetcar tracks in Winnipeg froze and jammed with freezing mud and snow. Keeping them clean, whatever the weather, was the job of the switchman.

Soviet animation movie based on a Kazakh tale: a little bird fights against a three-headed dragon.

Balkan actuality.

An elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac.

Jordan’s imagery is exquisite and eloquent, concentrating on simple, repeated use of particularly poetic symbols and figures, a conglomerative effect of old Gustave Dore drawings, 19th century whatnot memorabilia, all fused to a totally aware perception. —Lita Eliseu, East Village Other

The photographs of a member of the Gestapo, with narration from the captions he left in his album. Film released in 1964.

Story about a man whose environment doesn't let him live his simple life.

A six minute film of the funeral of the murdered Metropolitan Emilianos of Grevena, of which all has been lost, save for 17 seconds. Emilianos was murdered on October 1st, 1911.

Early Balkan footage.

Oscar nominated animated short from 1972. An animated short from British comedian Bob Godfrey.

In GLORIA! Frampton juxtaposes nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary forms through the interfacing of a work of early cinema with a videographic display of textual material. These two formal components (the film and the texts) in turn relate to a nineteenth-century figure, Frampton's maternal grandmother, and to a twentieth-century one, her grandson (filmmaker Frampton himself). In attempting to recapture their relationship, GLORIA! becomes a somewhat comic, often touching meditation on death, on memory and on the power of image, music and text to resurrect the past.

Short film utilizing quick cuts and multiple angles of a one-man-band musical performance by Sid Lavarents (who served as both film-maker and musician). Added to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress for 2000.

The Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was a radically youth-oriented and countercultural revolutionary group opposed to war and the status quo of American culture. Known for using theatrics and humor to advocate social change, several Yippies were notably on trial as the Chicago 7. Primarily consisting of footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago which sparked massive demonstrations that were met by violence and hysteria caused by the police. This film also includes found newsreel footage as well as Pigasus - the pig the Yippies advanced as a candidate for President of the United States.

Another street scene from the Lumiere company

The camera pans across a field of flowers at extreme speeds in this short film by Hollis Frampton.