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City Symphony
see all genres ›Avant-gardists of the early 20th century were unabashedly in love with progress, modernity, urban life and found that newfangled medium of film to be a perfect vehicle to express their poetical (but not uncritical) rapture over the "new." While the most famous "city symphony" movies were made in the 1920s and '30s, it's an experimental genre that still surfaces in various forms today.
Discover City Symphony Films
Genres / Avant-garde / City Symphony
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145 W. 21
One of photographer/filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt's earliest 16mm films, 145 W. 21 plays very much like an amateur movie, albeit one featuring an especially notable cast (Burckhardt pals Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, Edwin Denby and Virgil Thomson, among others). A romantic pair leaves their flat for a desultory burlesque show and...Start your free trial to watch
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Avenue de l'Opera
You aren't imaging things. This short, filmed on the aforementioned Avenue de l'Opera in Paris, is backward as intended. As a bit of excessive cleverness, the music (a recent addition) is scored (or, rather, recorded) back-to-front as well. If you'd ever wondered what things were like in the most famous...Start your free trial to watch
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Aviary
Made in collaboration with Joseph Cornell. “Rudy Burckhardt photographed this impression of New York’s Union Square under Joseph Cornell’s direction. This location held a particular fascination for Cornell, who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film he treats the park as an outdoor...Start your free trial to watch
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Cerveza Bud
“This filmic slice of life coalesces into an ethnographic view of a possible future: the city as a constantly bubbling, delirious playground where yesterday’s monuments are symbols to be triumphed over, and tomorrow never arrives. Perhaps this is why the ultimate effect is one of wistfulness, due also to the unexpected...Start your free trial to watch
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Continuum
In CONTINUUM, the world, the workers within the world and the labor of making the film itself are equated through montage and a brilliantly concentrated filmic "painterliness." The result is an experimental film which is at the same time a document of propaganda in the sense that at its conclusion, one finds oneself closer to...Start your free trial to watch
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Default Averted
When New York was about to go bankrupt, all construction had stopped and an architect tried to become a wrecker. This is the story of the demolition of a large factory building on 23rd Street and 6th Avenue. Meanwhile, daily business (grimy or funny; money or no money) goes on as usual. Music by Thelonius Monk and Edgar Varèse.Start your free trial to watch
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Doldrums
“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 wonderful color.” - Edmund...Start your free trial to watch
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East Side Summer
Rudy Burckhardt's color portrait of Manhattan's East Side strolls along at an easy pace befitting blue skies and Thelonious Monk's piano score. Where most city symphonies prize grandiose views of the urban organism, Burckhardt sticks to the walker's view; his camera delights in shopping promenades, stoop...Start your free trial to watch
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Go Like This
Frenetic and impressionistic, this nocturnal foray through San Francisco's streets (heightened by a stop at a nightclub) delivers a thrill-hit of ebullient adrenaline. The rush of excitement, of anonymity, of adventure, of being alive, of potentially meeting someone new is palpable. Somewhere in the middle of this burst of...Start your free trial to watch
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Highway
Hilary Harris’ nervy tour of Robert Moses’ New York hearkens back to the classic city symphonies of the 1920s but cut to fit the “go go go” energy of the new era. “The most exciting thing in film is movement,” Harris once wrote, and in HIGHWAY he shows why, shooting from a moving car for the road itself of its ramps, signs...Start your free trial to watch
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I'd Rather Be in Paris
I'D RATHER BE IN PARIS depicts the filmmaker's visual concern with his physical environment by autobiographically exploring his alternatives: Chicago, San Francisco and the editing room itself. These urban explorations tend to concentrate on high-speed assemblages of cityscape abstractions.Start your free trial to watch
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Intervals
INTERVALS is the Peter Greenaway’s self-described “attempt” at creating an entertaining, abstract film; a series of bustling streetscapes from that most photogenic of cities, Venice. Using a self-conscious experiment in frame rate and a structure borrowed from the most Venetian of concertos (Antonio Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons"),...Start your free trial to watch
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Man with a Movie Camera
This dawn-to-dusk view fo the Soviet Union offers a montage of urban Russian life, showing the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that endlessly whirl to keep the metropolis alive. It was Vertov's first full-length film and it employs all the cinematic techniques at the director's...Start your free trial to watch
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The Merciful and Compassionate?
Mexican singer Alejandro Fernandez's 1995 international hit "Como quien pierde una estrella" overlays posterized images of a teeming city and of a couple looking upward as an airplane moves like a fly across the sky with blank frames that translate the lamentations of the broken-hearted singer into...Start your free trial to watch
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Night Fantasies
Elliott Carter’s composition of the same title inspired Rudy Burckhardt, in collaboration with Yvonne Jacquette, to photograph this collage-style film. Mostly shot in New York City, but also in Hong Kong and Searsmont, Maine. Dance by Robert Black, Yoshiko Chuma, Grazia Della-Terza, Douglas Dunn, Dana Reitz, Harry Sheppard.Start your free trial to watch
