L.E.S. 1976/2011. USA. Written and directed by Coleen Fitzgibbon. With Tom Sigal, Diego Cortez, Robin Winters. Super 8mm transfer to digital. 17 min. L.E.S. is a documentary-style critique of the Island of Manhattma’s fiscal state of affairs and the John Dough Cult, filmed in the Lower East Side at a time when the city was experiencing economic collapse. Crime was at a high and the landscape was a patchwork of ghostly, abandoned blocks.
Future Visions. 2019. USA. Directed by Robert Polanco, Anexsa Polanco. Digital. 6 min. In the Fall of 2019, high school students and siblings Robert and Anexsa Polanco set out to make a dystopian film shot in their South Bronx neighborhood. They had no idea their film would be foreshadowing the events that erupted in the spring of 2020.
City Edition. 1980. USA. Directed by Alan Berliner. 16mm. 10 min. City Edition immerses us in a lived experience of the fourth estate, beginning with the print-run and purchase of a single issue of the New York Times; a rapid found-footage montage of political happenings, wars, sports, celebrity, and natural disasters ensues—the whole world in bits and pieces. These disparate scenes are woven in and out of one another as though rendering visually the dissonance of reading the folded pages of a newspaper as a singular thread of events.
Hot Dogs at the Met. 2009. USA. Directed by Ken Jacobs. Digital. 10 min. In this digital offering from Millennium founder Ken Jacobs, what first appears as distorted pixels gradually reveals itself to be an isolated detail of a stereoscopic photo tapestry of a family (Jonas Mekas’s) enjoying some of the city’s most basic pleasures. At once the subject of the photo and a part of the crowd it depicts, they are themselves a pixel in the three-dimensional tapestry of the living city.
Cheap Imitations, Part V/VI: Terms of Analysis. 1982–83. USA. Directed by Roberta Friedman, Grahame Weinbren. With Jim Fulkerson on trombone. Digital. 16 min. “Initially the subject was the multiple threats constantly implicit in cinema...especially in the perceptual acts of unifying with which we respond to the discontinuities of editing. So the basic images were knives and salamis. But as the music was reworked, highly charged objects began to appear and reappear; instinctual navigation took over, as always, in the editing room...and the film seemed to adopt another subject entirely. A bankrupt, scrappy 1970s New York City, interiors and on the street, insists on reappearing, even as the calm palms of Los Angeles and the deep scarlet Fall of New England fail to offset it. As in all our work, many issues are in uneasy balance and the film refuses to find a center” (Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren).
Visible Inventory 9: Pattern of Events. 1978. USA. Directed by Janis Crystal Lipzin. 16mm. 12 min. Pattern of Events is a very unique and personal take on a highly specific element of life in this city. “The viewing through magnifying lens and the voice-over narration of personals printed in the Village Voice Bulletin Board point directly to chance as the organizing principle of life. Yet people continuously thrown together by chance become obsessed with one moment, one image, one word, one person. ‘I must see you again.’ …. This film makes the barest glance reverberate with potential meaning” (Steve Anker and Gail Currey, The Last 80 Langton Street Catalog).
I Love New York. 2019. USA. Directed by Michel Negroponte. Digital. 3 min. “For most of my life, New York City has been my home. In the 1960s, when I was a teenager, I was inspired by the street photography of Gary Winogrand, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, and Lee Friedlander, who captured the unmediated energy of city living in their work. I do not take still photographs, but I have spent years roaming the streets with video and digital film cameras aiming to catch those fleeting moments that define the essence of my hometown” (Michel Negroponte).
West Side Highway. 1978. USA. Directed by Donald J Pollock. Digital. 8 min. West Side Highway was first screened by filmmaker Donald J Pollock on a super 8mm print at an open screening at the Millennium Film Workshop on East 4th Street back in 1978. Unseen for decades, it’s a simple document of a place both familiar and no longer existent, moving in its quiet historicity.
In Betweens. 2011. USA. Directed by Victoria Campbell. Digital. 6 min. In Betweens is a personal meditation on the change of time and space one feels in the city. Some of the last shots were filmed in the old Millennium Film Workshop on East 4th Street. The rooms were falling apart, stacked with reels of film, projectors, camera equipment, ripped flooring, and old Millennium Film Journal issues. It was right before a new tenant took over and gutted the space, renovating it into something new and unfamiliar. The film was shot in both digital and super 8.
Liberty. 2010. USA. Directed by Joel Singer. Digital. 4 min. “I left the city in 2009. A year later, I returned for a few months and took the ferry out to see Ms. Liberty close up for the first time. On the ferry I recorded the voices of some of my fellow passengers saying ‘Statue of Liberty.’ I spent the next month recording many more people saying the words in a wondrous variety of accents and languages. I was moved by the delight and pleasure that people took in uttering these magical words: words suggesting freedom and hope for millions of immigrants” (Joel Singer).
Program run time: approx. 92min.