My apologies.  I now saw in your original email that you asked for people to 
write you “off list”.

My apologies for replying to the full list.  Perhaps everyone could start 
replying off list as A Film requested:

[email protected]

 

From: Frameworks <[email protected]> on behalf of Adam Hyman 
<[email protected]>
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List <[email protected]>
Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2025 at 10:38 AM
To: Experimental Film Discussion List <[email protected]>, Quentin 
Darcq <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] City films

 

Getting out of the Euro-North American axis, one program in Los Angeles 
Filmforum’s series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, featured 
several city films:

https://www.ismismism.org/calendar/2020/10/2/la-filmforum-presents-urban-harmoniesdissonent-cities

 

Notes & curation by Jesse Lerner & Luciano Piazza

 

At the end of the silent era of cinema, there was an international cycle of 
films that depicted the nature of the modern city. These films, known as city 
symphonies or film symphonies, were edited as if following a musical score. The 
rhythm and succession of the images were immensely important for the 
filmmakers. In Latin America, some of the earliest experimental films 
participated in this cycle of city symphonies. For example, São Paulo: a 
Sinfonia da Metrópole (1929), by Rodolfo Rex Lustig and Adalberto Kemeny, and 
Humberto Mauro’s film-poem about his home town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 
Sinfonia de Cataguases (1929). Ever since those early efforts many filmmakers 
have maintained a fascination with the city, as Latin American cities were 
transformed by unfettered growth, industrialization, and massive rural to urban 
migrations. This free program offers a range of urban visions—some more 
celebratory, others more critical—of the architecture, daily life, public 
spaces, and transportation of cities such as Buenos Aires, Havana, Lima, 
Bogota, Los Angeles, Santiago, and London.

 

Habana Solo 

Juan Carlos Alom 

2000, 15 min, b&w, 16mm transferred to digital, Cuba

In Habana Solo some of the most important Cuban musicians from the most diverse 
musical tendencies of today, showing us the city in them and the city they 
inhabit with no other words than the music solos they improvise _ in solitary 
space and without restrictions, and we can see through the free lens of the 
camera, freedom based on undertaking the translation of the sounds of their 
music and the city’s, into an uninterrupted visual solo in which images 
concatenate each other, in the same way the musicians are composing in the real 
instant their improvised pieces, with the rhythmical and harmonical intensity 
of the music that happens, and with the same dose of abstraction _, making 
palpable the spirit of the city possessed by its musical sounds in the same 
proportion they sound, beat and visualize, with a texture that doesn’t betray 
its reality, possessed by her. -- Franklin J. Díaz

 

Inùtil Paisagem 

Louise Botkay

2010, 6 min,  b&w, 16mm transferred to digital, Brazil

Inùtil Paisagem a black and white space, a view of Rio de Janeiro, during the 
hours defined by the clocktower of Central Station, as a woman encounters her 
city, a friend, and the early melancholy of the afternoon."

 

Machinery No. 1 (Maquinaria No. 1)

Luis Soldevilla 

2011, 3 min, color, sound, video, Perú

This video explores - in an abstract way - the motion generated by machines 
that "carry away" the citizens and how this machine at the same time transport 
the necessary energy to keep the city´s vital flow. By means of combining the 
inner motion of the devices (ladders, trains an elevators) with an external 
motion (camera movements) these ideas of motion, energy and transportation 
acquire a new meaning, generating a sort of vertigo and the idea of no point or 
direction.

 

Constitución (Constitution) 

Melisa Aller 

2013, 4 min, b&w, sound, Super 8 transferred to digital, Argentina

No insides and outsides. The margins do not exist. Constitution is an intensive 
burst which does not seek individuals and forms, but seeks the different speeds 
and slownesses. Immanence. Distributing the affects, the intensities. There is 
no difference in the artificial from the natural. Because, the important is to 
know what a body is able to afford in a way of life.

 

Despedida (Farewell)

Alexandra Cuesta 

2013, 10 min, color, sound, 16mm transferred to digital, Ecuador/USA

Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood 
resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about 
endings, looking, and passing through, open up the space projected. A string of 
tableaux gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an 
ephemeral home.

 

La Poubelle 

Felipe Ehrenberg 

1970, 16 min, color, sound, video transferred to digital, México

La Poubelle a film by Felipe Ehrenberg about his garbage walks around London at 
the time of the strikes in 1970

 

Rapsodia en Bogotá 

José María Arzuaga

1963, 24 min, color, sound, 35mm transferred to digital, Colombia

"Rhapsody in blue - Rhapsody in Bogotá is the original title of the documentary 
known as Rhapsody in Bogotá.  It takes place over the cycle of a day, from dawn 
until the following dawn, showing the everyday lives of Bogotá and its 
inhabitants in the early 1960s.  The music of George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue 
and An American in Paris, with their syncopated chords, form a counterpoint to 
the images." Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano.  José María Arzuaga died 
in 1987.  

 

 

From: Frameworks <[email protected]> on behalf of Fred Camper 
<[email protected]>
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List <[email protected]>
Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2025 at 10:07 AM
To: Quentin Darcq <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] City films

 

Many of the suggestions so far except mine are for pretty well-known films. 
There is a lesser known city film by a well-known filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, 
titled City Streaming, that is quite great. I don't believe it is available 
digitally, however. There is of course Frampton's (fairly long) Zorns Lemma. 

Fred Camper
Chicago

On 4/1/2025 11:12 AM, Quentin Darcq wrote:

Hello,

 

In 2010, the Centre Pompidou in Paris released a DVD called "La Ville Moderne : 
Films issus de la collection du Centre Pompidou" with a bilingual booklet 
French/English and 7 short movies. Here are these movies. Many are available on 
Youtube or elsewhere on the internet. Otherwise, here is the Worldcat link: 
https://search.worldcat.org/fr/title/812206786 

 

Manhatta / Charles Sheeler et Paul Strand, 1921, 16 mm, black and white, 
silent, 9’48 ; 

Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse / Henri Chomette, 1923-1925, 35 mm, black and 
white, silent, 8’33 ; 

Nuits électriques / Eugène Deslaw, 1927, 35 mm, black and white, silent, 10’ ; 

Marseille vieux port / Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1929, 35 mm, black and white, 
silent, 10’42 ; 

Broadway by light /William Klein, 1958, couleur, sound, 10’35 ; 

New York Portrait : Part 1 / Peter Hutton, 1978-1979, 16 mm, black and white, 
silent, 15’23 ; 

16 X / Igor et Svetlana Kopystiansky, 1987, 16 mm, black and white, silent, 6’.

 

Quentin Darcq

 

 

On Tue, Apr 1, 2025 at 2:06 PM Scott Dorsey <[email protected]> wrote:

I can't help but think of Man With a Movie Camera and of course 
Daybreak Express, though.
--scott

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