Manfred Kirchheimer

An Essay on Death: A Memorial to John F. Kennedy

In 1964, National Educational Television decided to make a program as a memorial to President Kennedy. Since he had been assassinated just a year before, it seemed unnecessary to recite the events of his death again. Executive Producer, Brice Howard, discussed with Hurwitz the possibility of making a film for television that, instead of engaging the assassination head on, would deal with the inevitablity of mortality and its trauma. Essay On Death uses a story of a camping trip by a father and son to weave the thoughts about death that intercede in our everyday affairs. The commentary is made up of writings, ancient and modern, on the life and death. Beautifully realized, it succeeds at a task that mainstream television rarely attempts.

This Island

How the art in the Detroit Institute of Art connects to life's experiences and the neighborhood.

Stations of the Elevated

Stations of the Elevated exposes viewers to an underground art scene- that is, one found exclusively on the sides of subways and train cars. A moving portrait of late-70's NYC, the film boasts a soundtrack by jazz legends Charles Mingus & Aretha Franklin.

Free Time

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.

Canners

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.

We Were So Beloved

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.

The Sun and Richard Lippold

Documentary examining the work of sculptor Richard Lippold, particular his sculpture of the sun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dream of a City

Between 1958 and 1960 Walter Hess and Manny Kirchheimer shot black and white 16mm film from Wall Street to midtown New York to the Delaware River. They documented the activities at a huge construction site, street life in Hell’s Kitchen, New York harbor traffic, and rare glimpses of nature. Then the footage was left unedited. In 2017 Kirchheimer (DISCOVERY IN A PAINTING, TALL: THE AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER AND LOUIS SULLIVAN, STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED) took up the challenge of editing it. Once the picture was set he searched for music and sound effects that would mesh with the surrealism of the material. The result is a dynamic and compact symphony of a city.

Discovery in a Painting

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.

In Search of Hart Crane

Produced and directed by Hurwitz for National Educational Television (precursor of PBS), Hurwitz uses biographer and Columbia professor, John Unterecker, to help him look for the poet, Hart Crane, in his work and in the memories of many of his contemporaries. In Search of Hart Crane, 1966, is one of the very first interview-driven documentaries and is still a masterpiece of the literary documentary film.

For Life, Against the War

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.

Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan

Documentary about New York skyscrapers.

My Coffee With Jewish Friends

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.

Tellin’ The World

Encouraging the new youth vote to head to the ballot box

One More Time

A coda to the suite Kirchheimer began with 2018’s Dream of a City, One More Time poignantly intercuts our last glimpses of the cycle’s black-and-white, late-fifties New York with color outtakes from 1981’s Stations of the Elevated, depicting a different yet equally distant moment in the life of the city. Placed simultaneously between and beyond these two eras, the film becomes a lyrical lament for the promised New York that never was.

Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study

"Eisenstein journeyed to Mexico in late 1930 to begin shooting a film. With backing provided by Upton and Mary Craig Sinclair, the great Soviet auteur planned to make an epoch-spanning pageant of Mexico’s political history and cultural iconography, moving from the pre-Columbian era through colonization and, finally, revolution ... with the project running over budget the film was shut down. Sinclair eventually deposited the film materials at MoMA in 1953, at which point the scholar Jay Leyda assembled and annotated the shots, ordering them according to the filmmaker’s plans and presenting the images just as they had been shot, unedited ... here one is given the opportunity to attend to Eisenstein in an entirely different way, and aspects that might otherwise be overshadowed come to the fore: the way he works with nonprofessional actors, for example, or the striking mise-en-scène." - MoMA