Wednesday, May 29th, 7:30 PM

Dream of a City
2018, 39m, DCP Digital
Shot between 1958 and 1960 with Walter Hess, largely on black and white film, this long gestating project is Kirchheimer’s most concentrated work yet. Documenting the gradual progress of a high-rise construction site, the film expands concentrically to embrace the thrumming life and resplendent grandeur of mid-century New York from the waterfront to Hell’s Kitchen. An alternately harmonious and cacophonous collage of Bach, Debussy, and Shostakovich plays against the sounds of street life and heavy industry, as the film moves between center and periphery and back again. Surreal flights of fancy mix with hard doses of reality. A Whitman-esque excursus to the natural environs of the Delaware River abruptly gives way to the maze-like canyons of Wall Street. Less city symphony than symphonic suite à la Duke Ellington’s “Asphalt Jungle”, this opus comprises a personal valediction on a bye-gone era.

Colossus on the River
1965, 15m
This short depicts the docking of an ocean liner (the legendary SS United States) on the New York waterfront. With an eye for both the awesome scale of the effort and the human scale of the labor, Kirchheimer fashions a tone poem out of the delicately precise maneuvers that once made up a commonplace ritual of coastal cities.

Total Runtime: 53m

This program is part of Dream of a City and Manfred Kirchheimer’s New York