"Filmmakers often try to make a great film by making it feel heavier than film is by nature. R.B. seems happy if he can make his feel lighter. That does leave him unique, and he succeeds in it too. There is no distortion of image or sound. Its magic invention - including the later dream-weight - is new and inscrutable. It is a film that changes when you watch it again, it has many surprises I haven't mentioned. Take it as a wonderfully touching dream and as an amazing marvel of filmmaking." - Edwin Denby
Rudy Burckhardt was born in Switzerland in 1914 and came to New York in 1935. He showed his first two films (NYC subjects) in 1937. He has made more than 70 since, few longer than half an hour, all minimal budget. From the start they have been personal, unmistakably his.
Crates and boxes unloading in the morning, lonely men sitting on half-broken docks in the afternoon, sailor bars at night with one poor bum actually getting the heave-ho, a mighty waterhose washing it all away, overlooked by the skyline.
1946, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $35
Starring Edwin Denby, Red and Mimi Grooms.
"Happy with his luscious daughter Aurora in a rustic setting, Professor Borealis has devised an improved brain and is ready to transplant it. From this point the action keeps turning corners. A really great performance by Red Grooms. Photography and direction are highly personal but poker-faced. The humor is tenderly black. Burckhardt's fusion of documentary-type photography with fairy tale story line is nearer Keystone than avant-garde with its visual honesty and particular virtuosity." - Edwin Denby
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 38m, $115
A silent screen-type comedy starring Edwin Denby as Hemlock Stinge.
"It deals with old Mr. Stinge, the unlovable billionaire, and many other characters, rich and poor. It shows the luxury and degradation of New York City and the simple fresh air of Maine. The story can't resist slowing up to look at a girl; it skips a few logical links when it gets too complicated. It is being told by a hard-drinking farmer to his son to inspire him to become a billionaire too. The photography is masterful and draws no attention to itself. The text by Joe Brainard, ditto. The documentary sequences show people and buildings on the kind of real life day when you keep finding comedy wherever you look. Special to Burckhardt is the light touch. The jokes - many small touching ones, others outright gags - are left unexploited and unexplained. The characters are all pretty bad, money is the root of all evil, and they ought not to enjoy themselves but they do anyway. The film is clearly unpretentious, free-wheeling and imaginative." - Edwin Denby
1968, 16mm, b&w/so, 45m, $135
"A few acres in Maine. Closeup looks at a small lake in the woods, wild flowers, clouds, mosses, ants and mushrooms. The visual richness is fantastic, the objective eye is absorbing. Often cut by glimpses, the second time you see the film you see twice as much, and each time the power and depth of feeling are new." - Edwin Denby
"Like a mescaline high." - Frank Lima
1970, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
Starring William Dunas.
What are drugs all about? Here is an answer so many have been waiting for. In the form of a documentary epic this epic document shows their cause and effects, good and bad, and what can be done about it. Must be seen from the beginning.
1971, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 35m, $105
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.
1975, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 38m, $115
Images of city and landscape moving with a romantic piano sonatina by Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), then classic keyboard figures by Johann S. Bach. Images and music, "in" the same time-space, sometimes join and affect each other, then pursue their own independent course again.
1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 23m, $65
"Taking its title from the favorite elixir of New York Hispanics and its format from collage, 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 Maine woods, both visually mocking Central Park's trampled pastorality and offering its frenetic revelers an alternative route." - Trevor Winkfield
1981, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $65
"From Machu Picchu's sunswept stolidness to the mugging unwashed faces of Neapolitan kids; from Tokyo's Yoyogi Park where teens lip sync and step a la fifties R&B groups to groomed-hair New York streets of 1964; from a busy square in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (with bright pink dresses) to a country fair in Maine, AROUND THE WORLD ... looks in on six locales and reports them directly back. The indigenous images echo and counterpoint, presenting a panorama of glorious earthly variety; unadorned realities sweetened by their transiency one to the next, mirroring and magnifying life's own." - Reed Bye
1983, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
Images to accompany the lines of a poem by John Ashbery.
"Rudy Burckhardt's film is a brilliant extension of my poem, perhaps the film I might have made myself if I were a filmmaker." - John Ashbery
1983, 16mm, color/si, 8m, $25
"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.
"The film went on to the end being novel, and I thought its smile was becoming more and more mysterious. Filmmakers often try to make a great film by making it feel heavier than the film is by nature. R.B. seems happy if he can make his feel lighter. That does leave him unique, and he succeeds in it too.
"There is no distortion of image or sound. Its magic invention - including the later dream-weight - is new and inscrutable. It is a film that changes when you watch it again, it has many surprises I haven't mentioned. Take it as a wonderfully touching dream and as an amazing marvel of filmmaking. It is his sixty-first." - Edwin Denby
1982, 16mm, color/so, 26m, $75
To a poem by Kenneth Koch with Chopin played by Gena Raps.
"Arranged in staccato verses rapid as machine gun fire, the poem is read on the soundtrack while the visual choreography unfurls. The poem riffs on the plausible possibilities and remembered musings that took place in beds the poet has known. While some of these are reenacted, there's room for luxurious pauses while the visuals catch up with the poet's triggered thoughts running banshee away into formerly unexplored regions of hilarious fantasy and sweet memory: a morning coffee vision becomes penetrable as, lugging a typewriter into bed, a poet, surrounded by muses (in silk night gowns) composes a ditty before unreluctantly submitting to mere mortal pleasures; a portrait sitter's fantasy of seeing the artist working topless is spliced in; a scantily dressed damsel sleepwalks her way through a dawning forest into the viewer's daydreams.
"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." - Gregg Masters
1986, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $65
Text: Ron Padgett
A diary or collage film, ranging from snow in the Catskills, with stop-overs in Boulder, Colorado and San Francisco, to Easter in New York, flowers and cows in Maine, a Caribbean carnival in Brooklyn, country fairs with men splitting wood and women weight-lifting; and a last section with all these combined and more. The film is also about Venus - two of them actually - one a classic Renaissance Venus, the other a Nordic, Gothic one, the Venus of the Broken Trees. The music is a collage too, ranging from Spike Jones to Hector Berlioz' "Nuits d'Ete."
1987, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75