A group of boys, evacuated during World War II from London to a coastal town, form a gang and play war games. Too young to fight in the war and afraid it will be over by the time they come of age, the group members, who are also in the school’s Army Cadet Force initiate a battle with the local teenagers. Based on the novel “The Custard Boys”, by John Rae.
Made on a wind-up Bolex camera, The Sound of Seeing announced the arrival of 21-year-old filmmaker Tony Williams. Based around a painter and a composer wandering the city (and beyond), the film meshes music and imagery to show the duo taking inspiration from their surroundings. The Sound of Seeing served early notice on Williams’ editing talents, his love of music, and his dislike of narration. It was also one of the first independently-made titles screened on Kiwi television. Composer/author Robin Maconie later wrote pioneering electronic music.
A dramatization of key episodes in the life of Sojourner Truth, a freed slave who was born in 1797 and died in 1883, and became one of the first fighters for the civil rights of the Negro. Actress Pauline Meyers plays Sojourner in this vivid topical profile.
An early example of computer generated animation; several hundred dots move about the screen according to a set of instructions in a graphics program which were input into a IBM digital computer and coloured by an optical printer.
On this episode of Camera Three, actress Claire Bloom reads poetry. Excerpts include selections from T.S. Eliot, Lord Byron, A.E. Housman, Sir Philip Sydney, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and medieval carols.
Promising young racing car driver Joe Joe Quillico leaves the stock car racing scene in the United States in order to pursue Grand Prix racing in Europe. After limited success he manages to win the Spanish Grand Prix. His love life however, is much less successful and his winning on the track only serves to alienate the woman he loves – with unhappy consequences.
Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Jean-Marie Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith’s subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
