“Happy with his luscious daughter Aurora in a rustic setting, Professor Borealis has devised an improved brain and is ready to transplant it. The humor is tenderly black. Burckhardt's fusion of documentary-type photography with fairytale storyline is nearer Keystone than avant-garde with its...
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose...
Seeing the World: Part One - A Visit to New York, N.Y.
2.11937HD
A sightseeing portrait of New York, with lively narration taking the viewer aboard the New York elevated and subway trains. Then the view from the windows becomes slightly abstracted, the voice of the commentator becomes uncertain. Featuring Joseph Cotten (credited 'Cotton') Virginia Nicholson...
A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park...
Larry is a madly energetic, oversexed artist. Jane, a combination of palm reader and psychoanalyst, is trying to straighten him out. John is a straight boy interested in baseball who ends up an abstract painter.
First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film...
"The New Jersey Turnpike and downtown New York in rain and shine. Trailer trucks, overpasses and industrial wastes become natural wonders. The stream of trucks is often gay but sometimes ominous. After a thunderstorm, the pike gives way to charming and sexy shoppers on 14th Street. Real sounds and...
Rudy Burckhardt shot plenty of film while he was stationed in Trinidad with the Signal Corps in the early 1940s. This short film compiles some of the choicest bits.
Untilted takes an intrigued look around and reports on how things appeared then and what everyone was up to. Lines from a poem by John Ashbery cross the screen at times and our grasp of his elusive language is strengthened by the accompanying images. The land and people of Maine, New Mexico, and...
A piano sonata by Josef Haydn and New York City. The first, allegro movement is choreographed by midtown crowds, crossing every which way, often barely avoiding collision. For the long, slow second movement we see quiet, stately buildings, their columns, cornices, portals and ornaments, with only...
"…one cannot deny its documentary value or Burckhardt's eye for detail, his unpretentiousness. There are sequences — the children swimming under the Brooklyn Bridge is one — which belong with the best footage on New York by anybody." — Jonas Mekas
