Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York

Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.

Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterl...