The Aviary

Short film by Swiss-American film-maker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, featuring a poem by Kenneth Koch.

A travelogue of Port-au-Prince, Haiti concentrating on the daily life and rhythm of tropical island life.

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.

A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park shared by birds, the young and the old.

Looking down at nature's small works in the woods of Maine, then straight up at the sky, then down again at the daylong journey of an inchworm.

A film-dance, shot on 16mm film in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

A silent screen-type comedy starring Edwin Denby as Hemlock Stinge, the unlovable billionaire.

Burckhardt collaborates with artist Simonds to produce a portrait of the artist as a foundation.

“Happy with his luscious daughter Aurora in a rustic setting, Professor Borealis has devised an improved brain and is ready to transplant it. The humor is tenderly black. Burckhardt's fusion of documentary-type photography with fairytale storyline is nearer Keystone than avant-garde with its visual honesty and particular virtuosity.” — Edwin Denby

"The movie opens with a banana still-life vignette seen ripening through time-lapse photography for several days on a rooftop. The energy-charged New York Marathon follows, suggesting the rush of locations and pace about to unfold. The sense of traveling is persistent, we are taken from the marathon in New York, to breakfast in Maine, back to busy city streets, to the Grand Canyon, sky, the dancer Dana Reitz working out in the woods, poets posing, and the journey goes on. There is hardly a breather. Lines of David Shapiro's poem 'When a Man loves a Woman' are printed occasionally across the screen In one segment we hear Alice Notley read her poem 'A Woman comes into the Room.' Essentially a collage of images and sound, the precise order of events is unimportant. Overlays of time, season and location become fulfilling and cumulative experience, the particular sequences like cuts on a diamond." – Joe Giordano

To a poem by Kenneth Koch with Chopin played by Gena Raps. "Rudy's lyrical montage opens and reflects the world the way a poem does. He consistently gets to the essential fragments of an experience or a view. His perspective is that of a pedestrian god of sidewalks, a celebrator of details we might have missed. The films are about desire, bewitched noticing and, most of all, love." – Greg Masters

"This filmic slice of life coalesces into an ethnographic view of a possible future: the city as a constantly bubbling, delirious playground where yesterday’s monuments are symbols to be triumphed over, and tomorrow never arrives. Perhaps this is why the ultimate effect is one of wistfulness, due also to the unexpected intrusion of a memento mori in the guise of a nude traversing the Maine woods…" - Trevor Winkfield

A snow storm – Disney World – self important New York – ox-pull in Maine – a special old man – strip tease – an ant in the woods –wild 14th street – a mugging survived – the end.

Made in the final year of his life, Rudy Burckhardt’s Scattered Showers begins its journey in the city he so scrupulously documented in photographs and film for the greater part of his career.

Since 1970 Simonds has created Dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of “Little People” who are migrating through the streets of neighborhoods in cities throughout the world; New York, Paris, Shanghai, Berlin, London, Dublin among many others. Below is a selection of films of Simonds constructing Dwellings on the Lower East Side of New York.