Lincoln Center is kickstarting a new film series called “Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York,” which will feature documentaries and experimental films that were made in, and are about, New York City.
The series, which begins on Friday, will exclusively include films from the collection of the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, the well known film nonprofit founded in 1961 by Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, and Lloyd Michael Williams.
The artist-run initiative was designed to give filmmakers creative control over their own work, and aims to spread its collection internationally, hosting sponsorships and residencies.
Films from the collective are grouped in to 10 themed programs, including “Moving Through the Metropolis: Transit Images,” “The Postwar City Symphony,” “Gentrification and Urban Renewal,” “Off to the Beach: Coney Island,” and more.
The series has films from acclaimed figures in experimental cinema such as Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker, and even Arthur “Weegee” Felig, who was known for being a black and white street photographer who switched to filmmaking later in his career.
Many of the films will be shown on 16mm prints.
“New York is perhaps the most represented city in all of cinema, but people are generally familiar with how it’s been portrayed in commercial fiction films,” Dan Sullivan, a programmer of film at Lincoln Center and an organizer of the series said. “The view from the underground is just as rich, if not even richer.”
While these films express the layered nature of New York, some of them also address the ongoing issues of class and race divides and gentrification that have long affected certain residents of the city.
One of the films that’s part of the “Gentrification and Urban Renewal” theme even calls out Lincoln Center itself, documenting the destruction of San Juan Hill, the Puerto Rican neighborhood popularized by West Side Story that was cleared to make way for the theater and re-developed properties.
“These are places that in film history have been treated extremely divisively, problematically,” said Tom Day, executive director of the Film Maker’s Cooperative. “But these are films made by people who lived amongst these communities, lived within these spaces, and they were able to articulate a vision much more grounded in reality.”
This series kicks off on Friday, May 3rd, and will run until Tuesday, May 7th. General admission tickets start at $17, which can be found on Lincoln Center’s website.
