Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York

Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York

Stein, Erica

Hardcover

Series: Suny Series, Horizons of Cinema

Film StudiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1438486634
ISBN13: 9781438486635
Publisher: St Univ Of New York Pr
Published: Aug 1 2021
Pages: 300
Weight: 1.35
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.

Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.

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