Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 155: Tue Jun 4

Echoes of Silence (Goldman, 1966): Barbican Cinema, 7pm


This film is part of the Bebop: New York season at the Barbican. Full details here.

Film Comment review (full article here):
Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped something to the effect that “the history of the movies is the story of boys looking at girls.” That could be the motto for a small but rich sub-genre of films: near-plotless accounts of young male romantics ambling through picturesque cities, fixating on one beautiful stranger after the next, yet opening up to none of them, consoling themselves with their own private epiphanies while remaining essentially alone. The prototype perhaps is Bresson’s Paris-set Four Nights of a Dreamer, with José Luis Guerín’s beguiling In the City of Sylvia its closest modern-day successor—but the father of them all was Peter Emanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence, a micro-budget slice of New American Cinema shot on ragged black-and-white 16mm between 1962 and 1965. Set in the streets, bars, and cheap apartment buildings of New York, and starring a handful of the director’s friends and whatever passersby the camera happened to catch, it's filmed with the resources of a guerrilla documentarian and shot with the eye of a poet.

Max Nelson

Here (and above) is an extract.

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