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.
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Genres / Avant-garde / City Symphony
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Williamsburg
A pocket-sized city symphony, WILLIAMSBURG collects some of the first images Jonas Mekas shot with a film camera in 1950 (along with footage from 1972 when he was returning to his old neighborhood as a visitor). Bygone Brooklyn is richly evoked in the everyday life of the street: the elevated...Watch Movie
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Subway to the Former East Village
Richard Sandler’s gritty city symphony takes stock of New York’s Lower East Side with a decade’s worth of moments and encounters that would otherwise be lost to history. Working against gentrification’s erasures, he catalogues the neighborhood’s changes in their particularity:...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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In the Course of Human Events
From the moment we see a wrecking ball crashing through San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway, it is clear that IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS will not comply with the progressive view of technology and history advanced by the classic city symphonies of the 1920s. By focusing on...Watch Movie
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Pestilent City
Unspooling without dialog and with visionary, hair-raising force, Peter Emanuel Goldman's disquieting lyric is less a "city symphony" than dirge, a kind of prelude to TAXI DRIVER. Negative photography, slow motion and plain attentiveness to the everyday uncanny are all marshaled to reveal the...Watch Movie
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Premonition
The eye-of-the-storm in Dominic Angerame's "City Symphony" series, PREMONITION occupies the ghostly interval between the Loma Prieta earthquake and the resulting demolition of San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway. The abandoned highway is an apt figure for the imagination of disaster,...Watch Movie
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The Soul of Things
William Denton is one of the early pioneers exploring the art and science of psychometry. Psychometrics believes that every object emits a field of energy. That energy can transit its entire history through touch. That is every brick contains the history of what happened...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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Deconstruction Sight
Longtime San Francisco filmmaker Dominic Angerame turns the classical city symphony on its head by focusing on demolition rather than forward-progress. Filmed in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake, DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT plays like an avant-garde disaster movie, an...Watch Movie
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Rock Soup
It's the summer of 1989 in New York's Lower East Side. Homeless people have turned Tompkins Square Park into a tent city. On a nearby corner lot deeper in Alphabet City, where punk became famous and Allen Ginsburg wrote much of his poetry, a bunch of people try to make a soup kitchen work. They...Watch Movie
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Visions of a City
Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film VISIONS OF A CITY, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is unirritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all...Watch Movie
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NYC 3/94
Another video collage, this one woven around the idea of a city under siege. Commissioned by European television, NYC 3/94 is part of a series called POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA. Various American artists were asked to make short videos about the city they lived in. In March 1994, Hal Hartley was...Watch Movie
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Paradise of the Damned
Rock Ross' ironically titled, time-lapse record of a 1980s Gay Pride parade in San Francisco is hardly the celebration of a celebration one would expect. By stationing his camera at a jog in the route so that the floats and people head right at us and then veer off at the last...Watch Movie
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Immortality, home and elsewhere
Weaving around a theory of immortality based on the premise that our lives are a summation of all the information we consume and process, gleaned from existing theories from a number of scientific disciplines, the film draws on the filmmaker's brush with a global nuclear...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
