The Refracted City

We are honored to welcome longtime Film-Makers' Cooperative member Mark Street to the FMC Screening Room for a presentation of six of his recent, abstract city-themed shorts on 16mm and digital formats. In many ways, these works recall the urban filmic abstractions of such fellow avant-garde luminaries as Marie Menken, Rudy Burckhardt, and Stan Brakhage. They also manage to re-present and "refract" familiar metropolitan imagery with the implementaiton of various objects and membranes between the lens of Street's camera and the scenery he is capturing, be it photographic slides, pieces of architectural galss, or magnifiers, thereby complicating and subverting our typical visual assumptions of the "city symphony" genre. As eminent film critic and essayist Phillip Lopate once remarked: "Mark Street combines the strength sof hte city symphony, the essay film and the expeimrental film in one tender, dazzling pakcage which conveys the weirdness and fresh humanity of daily life." Noted curator and archivist Jon Gartenberg echoed: "The globe is Mark Street's cinematic canvas onto which he impresses shimmering reflections and lyric montage sequences."

The evening will begin with an hour-long program of Street's films, followed by a selection of city-themed shorts from the Coop's colleciton curated by Street in collaboration with Matt McKinzie. A Q&A and discussion with Street will conclude the screening.

Films by Mark Street

1. River of Days (7 minutes)
2. Lunette (8 minutes)
3. All Day and All of the Night (13 minutes)
4. Clear Ice Fern (12 minutes)
5. The Grain of Belfast (6 minutes)
6. Descent (9 minutes)

55 minutes.

Selections from the Coop, Curated by Street and Matt McKinzie

1. Go Go Go by Marie Menken (1964, 11 minutes)
2. She Was a Visitor by Donna Deitch (1970, 2 minutes)
3. Square Times by Rudy Burckhardt (1967, 7 minutes)
4. The Wonder Ring by Stan Brakhage (1955, 4 minutes)
5. No York City by Rick Liss (1983, 3 minutes)

27 minutes.

Total Run Time: 82 minutes + Q&A and discussion with Mark Street following the screening.