REMINDER: Jon Gartenberg's "Politically-Trenchant New York City Symphony Films (1984-2006)" screens TONIGHT at 8pm at Allied Productions Project Space
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REMINDER: Jon Gartenberg's program "Politically-Trenchant New York City Symphony Films (1984-2006)" screens TONIGHT at 8:00pm at Allied Productions Project Space (368 East 8th Street, Storefront West).
RSVP by clicking here, and read on to learn about Gartenberg's commitment to excavating and exhibiting city symphony films, dating back to the early 1970s.
Tonight at 8:00pm, curator Jon Gartenberg will present five politically-trenchant New York city symphony films at Allied Productions Project Space (368 East 8th Street, Storefront West, near Avenue C, on the ground floor). Spanning the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the films in the program (Steve Bilich's NATIVE NEW YORKER, Jem Cohen's NYC WEIGHTS AND MEASURES, Jack Waters' BERLIN/NY, Abigail Child's B/SIDE, and Jim Hubbard's ELEGY IN THE STREETS) posit New York City as a backdrop, and conduit, for political discourse pertaining to the AIDS crisis, economic gentrification, and 9/11. Together, these works critically engage with a myriad of seemingly disparate yet undeniably interconnected sociopolitical issues still impacting the metropolis we call home.
Beginning in the 1970s, while working as a curator in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, Gartenberg conducted extensive research into New York City Symphony films, especially as represented in avant-garde, experimental, and independent movies. Throughout his career he has curated city symphony programs for numerous museums, festivals, and conferences internationally, including MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art; “Visions of New York” programs for Ciné-Memoire (Paris) and a festival devoted to American Avant-Garde Cinema in Turin (Italy); and a conference on “Architecture, the City, and Cinema” held in Arrábida (Portugal).
Thanks to the research efforts of documentary filmmaker Stewart Buck, GME is thrilled to share this recently-rediscovered December 21st, 1979 broadcast on the WNYC-TV series NEW YORK ON FILM, which features an interview with Gartenberg on the occasion of MoMA's 50th Anniversary. In this interview, Gartenberg discusses (with moderator Nancy Littlefield of the Mayor's Office, Film and TV) city symphony films spanning from 1905 to 1957; specifically, both the formal vision of the filmmakers and the sociological aspects of life in the city as represented in these films. Among Gartenberg's selections are the Edison Company's CONEY ISLAND AT NIGHT (1905), a dazzling nocturnal panorama of America's playground made in the nascent years of the filmic medium, and Francis Thompson's visually-arresting, Cubist-Dadaist-inspired portrait of New York, titled NY, NY (1957), which GME distributes on DVD, and which Gartenberg invoked for the name of his 2014 article for Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films, and his subsequent 2015 NYU Tisch program of the same name. The full interview can be viewed below:
As an extension of this interest, GME distributes a number of city symphony films to North American universities on DSL and DVD. Included in our collection are such titles as MANHATTA (1921), Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Walt Whitman-inspired exploration of skyscrapers, Dziga Vertov's THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA (1929), which offers a glimpse of urban life in Moscow and the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Odessa during the late '20s, James Benning's LOS (2000), which offers a hypnotic journey through Los Angeles, and Steve Bilich's NATIVE NEW YORKER (2006), a New York city symphony as told through the lenses of both 9/11 and Indigenous identity, which screens in the program tonight.
For more information about all of GME's city symphony titles, click here. To read more about Gartenberg's city symphony programs and publications, click here.