Posts from the Reserve Film and Video Collection

Walt Whitman filled the pages of Leaves of Grass with poetry exalting the lives of Americans. While out in the streets, he observed and recorded the beauty of daily life. Whitman's poem "I Hear America Singing" is a delightful example how common activities make up the fabric of America.  Within its lines, a boatman owns a part of America, and a mother's daily activities are considered divine:

Black ink soaks through a transparent canvas to form an image drawn by the master, Pablo Ruiz Picasso. 

In Le Mystere de Picasso (1956), director Henri-Georges Clouzot creates a new type of art documentary: one which manages to capture art at the very moment of conception. The transparent canvas allows the camera to capture each stroke of the artist's brush in real-time, beginning in stark black-and-white, but then moving on to color. Later, Clouzot employs stop animation to account for the mixing and application of color in several pieces.  

In the smoldering heat of summer, one of my greatest pleasures has been to find reprieve in New York City’s lush and thriving community gardens. For all the grandeur of the city’s more widely celebrated green spaces like Central Park and Prospect Park, there are hundreds of small-scale urban oases nestled in formerly decrepit lots across the five boroughs.

Earlier this week, the view from my kitchen window in Brooklyn yielded a peculiar sight: spread across the rooftop of the building next door were rows upon rows of neatly arranged bread chunks. As a group of pigeons descended to claim their meal, I came to realize that my dear neighbor belongs to a subset of New Yorkers who enjoy the company of pigeons. From the folks who scatter birdseed in the park to devoted pigeon racers, pop-cultural enthusiasts and journalists writing about pigeons, the scavenging birds that most urbanites view with indifference, annoyance, or outright hostility (ever heard the moniker “rats with wings”?) have garnered a diverse league of appreciators. 

If you live in New York City and have the means and resources, you are probably experiencing the summer months at the seashore or mountains, far from the insulating properties of pavement and the incubatory effect of a subway platform.  Those New Yorkers who can or must withstand the heat, however, are not without certain benefits that elude us during the milder months: the stores are empty, the streets are empty and the sidewalks are positively navigable.

The great W. C. Fields may have resented being buttoned up, but he had little choice in the silent film era. Without being able to show off his gift for gab, the comedian had to rely on his vaudeville-honed physical gifts, which were also prodigious.

This spring, the Reserve Film and Video Collection is preserving Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill’s 1973 documentary Joyce at 34.   One can question whether or not discourses on family planning, reproductive politics and gender roles have advanced since the film’s release; what is certain is that Joyce at 34 remains potent and relevant as a document of the conflict endured by working mothers.

First in a series

Each day, professional, aspiring and student film and media-makers come through the doors of the Library for the Performing Arts (LPA) seeking resources that will aid in making their creativity become a reality.

If the 16th century focused on painting, the 19th on photography and the 20th on cinema, the 21st is all about integrated media.

For nearly 30 years I have had a constant and devoted relationship with the New York City Ballet. With the exception of a single dalliance with American Ballet Theatre in my early 20s (free tickets) and an occasional fling with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, I have remained steadfast and true to this singular dance company.

Food, Inc. is the latest and one of the most successful films to investigate the politics of produce- exactly who is controlling what we consume and the consequences of unethical industries- but it is certainly not the first.

Throughout these late winter and spring months, work crews have been feverishly drilling, planting, laying, grouting, irrigating, digging and welding outside of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in preparation for summer, when crowds of tourists and city dwellers will be looking for a shaded seat or a grassy knoll on which to perch with a sandwich or a friend.

If you take US Route 20 heading east from Albany, New York, you will eventually drive through the rural village of Nassau. There are three gas stations, a couple of pizza places and a trailer-cum-restaurant on the empty lot where Delson’s department store stood until it burned to the ground in the early 1980s.