Mounting Tension

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.

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.

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.

A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats the park as an outdoor aviary.

"R. B.'s new film is a magic dream, airy and clear. Everything you see is a fact, firm and distinct at the moment you are seeing it, a fact of daily life or of extraordinary dance, or of amateur acting, and you recognize each fact too, at a glance. Later, as the film continues, the factual seeing is still the same, but somehow it doesn't feel the same, it feels like a good dream you are dreaming, with a sly and witty tease to it, and nearly weightless." - Edwin Denby

A sightseeing portrait of New York, with lively narration taking the viewer aboard the New York elevated and subway trains. Then the view from the windows becomes slightly abstracted, the voice of the commentator becomes uncertain. Featuring Joseph Cotten (credited 'Cotton') Virginia Nicholson Welles, John Becker and Edwin Denby.

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

"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

"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

“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

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

With music by Elliott Carter adding drama and richness, a surreal dance by Dana Reitz and Alice Notley reading her poem "I work in a whorehouse, I seem to like it/it is dark like a cave, with pink light..." We visit briefly New York, Provincetown, Martinique, Hong Kong, ending in the dark woods of Maine, with glimpses of women, peculiar, sometimes erotic, always fleeting.

Rudy Burckhardt shot plenty of film while he was stationed in Trinidad with the Signal Corps in the early 1940s. This short film compiles some of the choicest bits.