Baby Baby (1965)
While I was at Cambridge University my girlfriend became pregnant.  The lack of sex education in the 1960’s meant that I failed to make the connection between sex and babies. Taking cues 'nouvelle vague' cinema this film juxtaposes adolescent sexual fantasies with the reality of procreation.
11m30s/black and white

Iggy the Eskimo Girl (1966/2008)
Iggy was a model and the girlfriend of Syd Barrett, and appeared on the cover of his album The Madcap Laughs (1970). She was terrific fun to be with and to photograph. I made a short film of her dancing in Russell Square, which portrays her as the ultimate flower child of the 1960s.
See Photography section for the 'Iggy Tryptichs.'
4m/colour
Produced in collaboration with Chimera Arts.

Nothing To Do With Me (1968)
A film portrait of Peter Whitehead that takes the form of an interview without questions - an experiment with Being and Time.
35m/black and white

San Francisco (1968)
San Francisco was a response to hearing “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd. It was my desire to make permanent the Pink Floyd lightshows created at the UFO club by Peter Wynne Wilson. The LSD-triggered psychedelic experience found its ultimate expression in this fusion of sight and sound, which achieved a visceral effect on the audience. San Francisco is 'painting with light' as well as a saturated archive of day to day life in the 1960's. New rhythms were created in the language of film, in using single-frame exposures and freeze-frame techniques.

"Anthony Stern's San Francisco is one of the key works of the British avant-garde cinema of the late-1960's. It is a 15-minute voyage, set to the Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive," that palpitates through the single-frame, hand-held procedures associated in the American underground cinema with figures such as Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas. Stern, first a painter who started in film as an assitant to Peter Whitehead, articulates light and colour and motion in the spirit of Lázló Moholy-Nagy (or of Harry Callahan's photographs of Detroit in the 40s); he stretches and stops and smears film time, treated here as psychoactive sculptural material." Jonathan Thomas, Film Curator
15m/colour

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