New York Stories
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6 itemsThe Short Films of Ken Jacobs
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This selection of Ken Jacob's early works, filmed on the Lower East Side not far from Metrograph's location at 7 Ludlow Street, offers a glimpse into the burgeoning American Underground of the 1960s, featuring characters including Jack Smith, and into the mind one of the most wildly creative and ...
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3 itemsThree by Shirley Clarke
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Dance was Shirley Clarke’s first creative outlet of choice, and even after she discovered a new vocation in cinema she would continue to think in terms of the expressive possibilities of rhythm, choreography, and free movement. A standout in the overwhelmingly male New American Cinema Group that ...
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2 itemsBill Gunn's Personal Problems
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Leaving November 1
Bill Gunn, actor, screenwriter, novelist, and the director of art-horror classic Ganja & Hess (1973), teamed with writer Ishmael Reed and producer Steve Cannon to produce what Reed has called a “meta-soap opera,” an exceptional, rough-edged ensemble piece exploring Black worki...
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The Queen
Directed by Frank Simon | 68 mins | 1968
Welcome to the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall! Simon’s essential document of queer history takes us backstage to rehearsals and dressing rooms at a drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina, and judged by a pa... -
Little Fugitive
Directed by Morris Engel | 81 mins | 1953
A pioneering influence on the French New Wave, this New York independent classic follows a seven-year-old boy through the hustle and bustle of Coney Island after he runs away from home, spooked by a cruel prank. It’s filmed with close-up immediacy thanks ... -
The Projectionist
Directed by Abel Ferrara | 81 mins | 2019
Ferrara’s fond, often funny portrait of Nicolas “Nick” Nicolaou, a Cypriot immigrant who got his start in movie houses working in the Times Square porno theaters in the 1970s and has held on into the 21st century as an independent exhibitor in spite of ov... -
Downtown 81
Directed by Edo Bertoglio | 72 mins | 2000
In 1980, writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie abou... -
Variety
Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featuring a who’s who of t... -
Inferno
Directed by Dario Argento | 106 mins | 1980
Showing Argento’s doubling down on visual logic of dreams, this mystical yarn of alchemy and witchcraft unfolds as a series of lurid setpieces and cryptic clue-drops, largely in a New York apartment building. Resisting explication, the story erupts with... -
Ornette: Made in America
Directed by Shirley Clarke | 85 mins | 1985
“Discovering the work of filmmaker and the Film-Makers' Cooperative co-founder, Shirley Clarke made me aware of the wide range of cinema’s possibilities. This 1985 documentary shot in collaboration with the late Ornette Coleman, using a diverse array of... -
The Great Pretender
Directed by Nathan Silver | 71 mins | 2018
When a French theater director (Maëlle Poesy-Guichard) comes to New York to direct an autobiographical play about her disastrous last relationship, a chain reaction of romantic escapades is set off by her two stars (Esther Garrel and Keith Poulson). Each... -
So Pretty
Directed by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli | 83 mins | 2019
Two young queer couples in New York City—transgender artist Tonia and her American academic boyfriend Franz; transwoman musician Erika and her political radical transmasculine partner Paul—find their daily lives gradually merging with the action...
