Jim Jennings – NYC & Field Recordings
Silent 16mm urban views of New York in a profile by Jim Jennings, presented alongside microscopic field recordings made in Rotterdam’s River Maas and on the Erasmus Bridge by Machinefabriek (the musician Rutger Zuydervelt).
For more than thirty years, Jim Jennings has worked as a film maker in the city of New York, which can be regarded as his muse. The obvious step is to regard his observations of the city and its inhabitants as urban portraits, but the films are too subtle for that. Often they were shot spontaneously in a single location, street or district, but beyond the deceptive simplicity is another way of looking (and filming) that in a certain sense seems to be torn free of reality. Is not the city itself that is seen through the camera, but the light that the city reflects: filtered and purified and put on 16mm film. A stream of light and dark areas, shifting and mirrored surfaces and peep holes, filled with details and rhythm, and often edited in the camera. That the films have no sound amplifies the feeling of rootlessness. Yet the energy of the city is tangible and occasionally audible, like an imaginary soundtrack.
In this combined programme
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Greenpoint
Greenpoint was made in Brooklyn in a Polish neighbourhood called Greenpoint. (Jim Jennings)
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Public Domain
Public Domain was shot all over Manhattan in my subway travels from job to job. (Jim Jennings)
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Wall Street
Wall Street was shot on lower Broadway from the rear window of a city bus on repeated rides I took during lunch hours in the autumn of 1980. To get
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Fashion Avenue
Fashion Avenue was mostly filmed on 7th Avenue (aka Fashion Avenue) in the Garment District between 34th and 42nd streets during working hours over
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The Breaking Water/The Breathing Bridge
The detached images of Jim Jennings enter into a dialogue as they are presented alongside the layered microscopic ‘field recordings’ of Machinefabr
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Silk Ties
Silk Ties was made mostly in the Garment District between 34th and 42nd streets on the west side from a plumbing truck I was driving in clogged tra
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