New York Pavements: Short Films from the Collection of the Film-Makers' Cooperative

A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. “The 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 aviary" (P. Adams Sitney). (1955, 5 minutes)

“Various parts of the city of New York, the busy man’s engrossment in his busy-ness, make up the major part of the film . . . Much of the footage was shot from a moving vehicle. The rest uses stationary frame, stop-motion. In the harbor sequence, I had to wait for the right amount of activity, to show effectively the boats darting about; some sequences took over an hour to shoot, then last perhaps a minute on the screen” (Marie Menken). (1964, 11 minutes)

During the course of a single winter’s day, January 16, 1966, Jonas Mekas captured impressionistic glimpses of people playing and working in Central Park and around the city on 16mm film. The kaleidoscope of skaters, strollers, vendors, and animals creates a multitude of patterns, while on the soundtrack Mekas comments candidly on the nature of cinema. (1966, 5 minutes)

Impromptu Super 8mm footage of the Lower East Side (L.E.S.) taken during the mid-1970s is accompanied by conceptual artist Robin Winters’ voice-over. Heard today, this probing and caustic commentary resonates as oddly prophetic. (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1976, 16 minutes)

Delicate fleeting imagery catches, in two minutes, the flurry of the city’s changing moods. “Her cinema is marked by a lush sensuality, a concern for light play and artfully woven soundtrack” (Barbara Hammer). (M. M. Serra, 1986, 2 minutes)

“This movie is a new kind of classic, it has invented once and for all the machine-gun sound of explosives and composed sentences with speeded-up speech and wild singing, laughter, hardly [at] all understandable, with violins screeching like falling bombs and a Hispanic grind dance . . . There are tender close-ups in interviews with women, and marvelous documents of dancers, street performers, all races and styles” (Anne Robertson). (Abigail Child, 1983, 9 minutes)

In 1976 Jonas Mekas made a film called Paradise Not Yet Lost with many street scenes of Soho from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Twenty years later, his daughter Oona Mekas created a new record of Soho, revisiting the neighborhood with her video camera and juxtaposing images from her father’s earlier film. (1996, 14 minutes)

Stereo photos from the 1970s are digitally animated with 3-D effects that can be viewed without spectacles, as the computer, considering location, emulates a painting technique. Featured are the filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Flo Jacobs, and Azazel Jacobs. (Ken Jacobs, 2009, 10 minutes)

“New York Gradual is a digital-age motion study consisting of three dolly shots taken during lunch hour in mid-town Manhattan. There are three sections, each of which is set to one piece of synthetic choral/electronic music that I composed. . . Within each section the images repeat in blocks of five frames at a time, and gradually advance one frame at a time for each block. The result of this simple pattern interacting with the imagery is a fascinating study of ordinary street life.” (Gregg Biermann, 2018, 15 minutes)