The West Village Meat Market1979

... was made as a documentation of a New York neighborhood, but combines the documentary mode with the metaphorical. Depicting empty as well as busy locations, garbage as well as meat, the love making of pigeons as well as the movement of trucks, it tries to evoke an irrelevant chronology of life. It is also a film about filmmaking. It explores the differences of fixed camera and camera movement, stationary and moving objects, black and white and color. By setting up formal oppositions, it focuses on some of the textural and spatial possibilities inherent in cinema – such as the contrast between dark cavities and flat surfaces, mist or smoke and solid silhouettes, running water and rolling wheels.