Tonight’s programme takes us from Harlem to Times Square, by way of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, and for one memorable early-morning trip on the subway.
With the exception of Daybreak Express, whose director DA Pennebaker went onto a distinguished career in documentary features, the other films tonight are by directors better known for their work in still photography: Helen Levitt, Rudy Burckhardt and William Klein.
These are films shot with the eye of a street photographer, capturing people unawares – adults in conversation on stoops, kids playing hopscotch or swimming under the Brooklyn Bridge. But there is also abstraction in Klein’s rhythmic portrait of the signs, lights, advertising and glorious spectacle of Times Square and, on the soundtracks, lashings of jazz from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.
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