Rudy Burckhardt

A pleasant tasting summer film made in New York and Searsmont, Maine. With poems by Daniel Shapiro (age five), performances by Dana Reitz, Yoshiko Chuma and Wang Pint; music by Duke Ellington and Gamelon of Bali.

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"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." - Ron Padgett

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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

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Here this display of New York textures and cross-sections is juxtaposed with the creation of a dance work, Jig Jag, by choreographer-dancer Douglas Dunn and his remarkable company. The natural humor and classically tender abruptness of their gestures and phrases are beautiful enlargements or details of, in human scale, in animal scale, body to body, the vectors of form and relation in the carefully eyed city life outside.

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Poems by John Ashbery; with performances by Douglas Dunn and Susan Blankenson, Yoshiko Chuma. "A grand synthesis of the poetic free association films by Rudy Burckhardt has been perfecting for the past fifteen years. Democratic in its celebration of all contemporary art forms (dance, painting, performance art, music, and, of course, film), encyclopedic in its images (from New York City interiors to Maine brooks to Latin American villages), it is finally most unique by virtue of its emotional range. The filmmaker has achieved a style which enables him to encompass everything from the whimsical, even silly, to the deeply philosophical and grave, with all shades of curiosity and neutral observation ('Just walking around,' as the subtitle says) in-between." – Phillip Lopate

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"Lurking crime and lingering desire change the atmosphere of this brief but affecting film. The light changes moment by moment. The season is shifting. Figures move like phantoms in the penumbra. Beethoven glowers against the evening; a perfect Alice polishes bronze with her petticoat; traffic in diamonds and rubies twines its way among the trees; snarling youths self-destruct. The false promises of youth, beauty and art are the smoke out the windows of fire along Fifth Avenue." -- Christopher Sweet

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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

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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.

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"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

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"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

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About the making of a large commissioned mural painting of an aerial view. From the first drawing out of a circling, single-engine plane, then transferring the studies onto three panels in New York, to the installation of the 27 feet wide, glowing-colored paintings in the post office of Bangor, Maine. With music by Domenico Scarlatti.

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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.

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A snapshot from the filmmaker's own life in rural Maine.

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Remember the skateboard craze? Made at its peak in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. With Tom Burckhardt, whose song "I'm a Skateboard Junkie" is played by Vincent Katz.

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"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

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In this film we see Katz drawing and painting. We see his paint table (he drinks Medaglia d'Oro and eats Skippy peanut butter in the country), his studio, the green view out the door. We see his models. We see him laugh as he works. We see a fly land on his T-shirt, at the shoulder. We see his paintings, lots of them, in detail and from across the room, still shots and gentle, sinuous pans. We see his enormous Times Square billboard in progress, then finished. We see a show being hung, and the opening, where the people inevitably begin to resemble the art on the wall - such a funny and exquisite sensation! And over it all we hear Alex talking to us about his work, talking about style and influence and perception in the most straight-forward way.

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Red Grooms' retelling of the classic children's story. Shot by the artist Rudy Burckhardt, it stars Mr. Grooms’s daughter, Saskia, and other friends and family members.

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"Good Evening Everybody" does not construct a world, but projects a personality. Burckhardt's camera observes life in a way characteristic of someone sensitive to irony, detail, diversity, humor, incongruity and (even) beauty, expressive of a cultivated, somewhat aloof, yet generous sensibility that suggests a perceptive, complicated and engaging, in fact ideal, traveling companion." Noel Carroll, SOHo News

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A documentary about the sex industry around 8th Avenue and 42nd Street.

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a travelogue of Peru.

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"A funny and gorgeous little animated story of the war between coke and pepsi – the bottles come alive and form armies. The battle scenes are spectacular." Ron Padgett, Tap Journal

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When New York was about to go bankrupt, all construction had stopped and an architect tried to become a wrecker. This is the story of the demolition of a large factory building on 23rd Street and 6th Avenue. Meanwhile daily business - grimy or funny, money or no money - goes on as usual.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A fairy tale about a pair of moccasins that take off on their own, through woods and fields into the town of Belfast, Maine. They fall in love, drink beer, dream in the gutter, at last are rescued by the boy on whose feet they belong. - MUBI

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"The New Jersey Turnpike and downtown New York in rain and shine. Trailer trucks, overpasses and industrial wastes become natural wonders. The stream of trucks is often gay but sometimes ominous. After a thunderstorm, the pike gives way to charming and sexy shoppers on 14th Street. Real sounds and wonderful color." - Edmund Leites

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