Dwellings Winter

Short film with sound by Rudy Burckhardt, assembled from the footage shot by Joseph Cornell for his own silent "Mulberry Street."

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

A sombre day in the city. "A Legend for Fountains" is the 16-minute version, "A Fable for Fountains" the 6-minute version.

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.

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.

Larry is a madly energetic, oversexed artist. Jane, a combination of palm reader and psychoanalyst, is trying to straighten him out. John is a straight boy interested in baseball who ends up an abstract painter.

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

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

"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

“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

Rudy Burckhardt’s breezy stop-motion animation follows after a poem by his New York School compatriot Kenneth Koch.

Untilted takes an intrigued look around and reports on how things appeared then and what everyone was up to. Lines from a poem by John Ashbery cross the screen at times and our grasp of his elusive language is strengthened by the accompanying images. The land and people of Maine, New Mexico, and New York City appear to wittily chosen music by Busconi, Duke Ellington, Merle Haggard, Philip Glass, Cecil Taylor, et al. There are heroic hang-gliders soaring over hills, cars streaming sweetly around a corner in Lower Manhattan, and Yoshiko Chuma's dancers in fierce rehearsal, performing with vulnerable whimsey at a traffic intersection and frolicking intently (and unclothed) in the woods.