Movies: Rudy Burckhardt

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jeal...

A sightseeing portrait of New York, with lively narration taking the viewer aboard the New York elevated and subway trains. Then the view from the windows becomes slightly abstracted, the voice of the commentator becomes uncertain. Featuring Joseph C...

A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditat...

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day....

“Happy with his luscious daughter Aurora in a rustic setting, Professor Borealis has devised an improved brain and is ready to transplant it. The humor is tenderly black. Burckhardt's fusion of documentary-type photography with fairytale storyline is...

Slightly different version of Cornell's Mulberry Street. Scenes of Mulberry Street on New York City's Lower East Side, as seen from the point of view of a bust of Mozart sitting in a store window....

A silent screen-type comedy starring Edwin Denby as Hemlock Stinge, the unlovable billionaire....

"The story of a shipwrecked baby reared by a kindly animal. See Tarzam, the beast-man, invent the art of painting. He meets his first human. His scene deepens from innocence to corruption and to final violence. Taylor is sublime, as always. The text ...

A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats...

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival W...

Photographer Rudy Burckhardt shows us the ebb and flow of people rushing about Manhattan. Equally exhilarating in his novel approach to snap images quickly on the run, a method he inaugurated and that continues to the present day. In film, he added s...

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Elliott Carter’s composition of the same title inspired Rudy Burckhardt, in collaboration with Yvonne Jacquette, to photograph this collage-style film. Mostly shot in New York City, but also in Hong Kong and Searsmont, Maine....

A sombre day in the city. "A Legend for Fountains" is the 16-minute version, "A Fable for Fountains" the 6-minute version....

"…one cannot deny its documentary value or Burckhardt's eye for detail, his unpretentiousness. There are sequences — the children swimming under the Brooklyn Bridge is one — which belong with the best footage on New York by anybody." — Jonas Mekas...

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 ...

A film-dance, shot on 16mm film in Long Island City, Queens, NY....

"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. L...

A travelogue of Port-au-Prince, Haiti concentrating on the daily life and rhythm of tropical island life....

"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 ...