Unseen cinema. 5, Picturing a metropolis. The pursuit of happiness / Cineric, Inc. presents ; by Rudy Burckhardt.

[United States] : Filmmakers Showcase, 1940.

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PICTURING A METROPOLIS is part of the film retrospective UNSEEN CINEMA that explores long-forgotten American experimental cinema. Photographer Rudy Burckhardt shows us the city as a place for marvelous moments with a focus on the ebb and flow of people rushing about Manhattan. As in his still photographs, Burckhardt finds quiet places within this mass of ever-busy humanity. Equally exhilarating is his novel approach to snap images quickly on the run, a method he inaugurated in the early 1940s. In film, he added slow and fast motion, split-screens and superimpositions to his repertory. An exquisite paean dedicated to the crowd and its life on the street. --BRUCE POSNER At 21, Rudy Burckhardt moved from Switzerland to New York City with poet-playwright Edwin Denby. He became an essential participant in the burgeoning modern art scene of painters, musicians, dancers, writers and the like. Taking up photography and filmmaking, Burckhardt "photographed and filmed his friends, including many New York School artists, as well as myriad views of his adopted city" [Roberta Smith] and produced substantial bodies of work in each, blending them together seamlessly in content and style. --BRUCE POSNER 16mm 1.37:1 black and white intenionally silent 16fps 8:23 minutes.

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November 02, 2020