Program 3: The Postwar City Symphony, Part 2

Introduced by Erica Stein, Associate Professor and Chair of Film at Vassar College and author of Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (SUNY Press, 2021) on May 4

The Burning of New York
Michael Jacobson, 1967, 16mm, 8m

N.Y.C. (No York City)
Rick Liss, 1983, 6m

Concern for the City
Peter Von Ziegesar, 1982, 16mm, 30m

Dream City
Steven Siegel, 1986, 16mm, 27m

Beyond the aestheticism and pure technical and perceptual adventurousness of films in “The Postwar City Symphony, Part 1,” the films in Part 2 use the city symphony mode as a means to explore more cerebral topics. The specter of environmental crisis and urban pollution hovers over the saturated and evocative imagery of Michael Jacobson’s hand-painted and starched-upon The Burning of New York, while the political realities of inequity flood the sound and image tracks of Steven Siegel’s Dream City. Rick Liss’s film N.Y.C. (No York City) is soundtracked by Laurie Anderson with a pulsating electronic beat that keeps the film’s vigorous tempo. This otherworldly tone is also present in the marriage of sound and image in Peter Von Ziegesar’s Concern for The City. These works usher in a new era for the city symphony—no longer bound by pulsating jazz scores and the surface textures of the built environment, they appear duty-bound to explore and opine on the changing metropolis in terms and contexts that remain prescient today.