Spraymasters

A humorous and illuminating series of coffee klatches with 20 friends that proves the old adage, “Where you have two Jews, you have three opinions.” Ranging in age from 18 to 85, and in experience from greenhorn to Pulitzer-Prize winner, the film’s subjects kibitz over all manner of concern, from Israel to tight pants, gay rights, and the place of women at the Wailing Wall.

Rummaging through city trash for hours and miles, New York’s gleaners gather and recycle soda cans for a nickel apiece. The stories they tell are full of humor, violence, tragedy, and resilience. As Kirchheimer’s documentary reveals, however, their tireless labor is ignored or scorned, but for the occasional doorman or Good Samaritan who chooses to lend his hand rather than avert his gaze.

The anger and outrage captured by graphic artists have defined revolutions through the centuries. Printmakers have depicted the human condition in all its glories and struggles so powerfully that perceptions, attitudes and politics have been dramatically influenced. And the value and impact of this art is even more important today. In the new documentary, ART IS... THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION, three contemporary American artists and a master printer help explain the dynamic sequences of social reality and protest. Among the wide range of 60 artists on display are Rembrandt, Goya, Daumier, Kollwitz, Dix, Masereel, Grosz, Gropper, and Picasso. While their stirring graphics sweep by, the making of an etching, a woodcut and a lithograph unfolds before our eyes, as the contemporary artists join their illustrious predecessors in creating art of social engagement.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

Following his use of art, painting and sculpture, in his work of the previous decades, Hurwitz took on a project for the American Foundation of the Arts aimed at deepening and enriching, for art students, the way in which we see. Working with his second wife, the editor Peggy Lawson, he made four short films comprising The Art of Seeing Series. The films, made without words, are beautiful poems to the pleasure of sight. This film came as a challenge that Hurwitz made for himself, to replicate in film his experience of seeing a work of art — in this case Césanne’s Still Life with Apples, 1895-98, that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although he finished the visual part of the film, he was stymied by the soundtrack in which he wanted no narration. About 45 years later, his colleague, Manfred Kirchheimer, created a sound track and produced the finished film.

Passage across a suspension bridge, moving from the country to the city, a half minute trip ­expanded. Choreographed cables, girders and arches.

Meticulously restored and constructed 16mm black-and-white footage shot in New York between 1958 and 1960. This lustrous evocation of a different rhythm of life captures the in-between moments—kids playing stickball, window washers, folks reading newspapers on their stoops—and the architectural beauty of urban spaces, set to the stirring sounds of Ravel, Bach, Eisler, and Count Basie.

A poetic blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking, depicting the changes brought on by urban planning as seen in New York City and the large mechanical claw that demolishes the architecture seen in the film.

Filmmaker Manfred Kirchheimer gained the trust of holocaust survivors living in New York's Washington Heights who agreed to talk to his cameras. But what they told him went so far against the grain that it could only be described as controversial.

Documentary about New York skyscrapers.