Bridge High is an evocative passage across a suspension bridge. Moving from the country to the city, the film expands the half minute it takes a car to cross, into a nine-and-a-half minute trip, choreographing cables, girders and arches into an exuberant dance.Read More »
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Between 1958 and 1960 Walter Hess and Manny Kirchheimer shot black and white 16mm film from Wall Street to midtown New York to the Delaware River. They documented the activities at a huge construction site, street life in Hell’s Kitchen, New York harbor traffic, and rare glimpses of nature. Then the footage was left unedited. In 2017 Kirchheimer (DISCOVERY IN A PAINTING, TALL: THE AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER AND LOUIS SULLIVAN, STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED) took up the challenge of editing it. Once the picture was set he searched for music and sound effects that would mesh with the surrealism of the material. The result is a dynamic and compact symphony of a city.Read More »
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Manfred Kirchheimer’s deeply humane Canners takes to the streets in an ode to the men and women who earn their daily bread by diligently collecting New York City’s bottles and cans.
He talks to them about their struggles, their families, and their dreams, never straying too far from his work’s abiding subject, survival in the city.
This lyrical documentary, along with his award-winning previous films (Stations of the Elevated (1981), We Were So Beloved (1985), Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan (2004), among many others) makes a superb addition to a body of work fifty years in the making, defined by Whitmanesque generosity and grandeur.Read More »
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Stations of the Elevated (1981) is a 45-minute city symphony directed, produced and edited by Manfred Kirchheimer. Shot on lush 16mm color reversal stock, the film weaves together vivid images of graffiti- covered elevated subway trains crisscrossing the gritty urban landscape of 1970s New York, to a commentary-free soundtrack that combines ambient city noise with jazz and gospel by Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin. Gliding through the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan – making a rural detour past a correctional facility upstate – Stations of the Elevated is an impressionistic portrait of and tribute to a New York that has long since disappeared.Read More »