Bridge High
10min / 1975 / USA / English / 16mm
Passage across a suspension bridge, moving from the country to the city, a half minute trip expanded. Choreographed cables, girders and arches. Directed by Manfred Kirchheimer & presented by the Cinema Conservancy Screening Series.
Short Circuit
45min / 1973 / USA / English / 16mm
In his apartment on the corner of 101st Street and Broadway, a documentary filmmaker begins to question his interactions to the white family and black workers he shares his daily existence with. Staring out his window he begins to drift and fantasize a parallel life, which turns into a complex sound and image montage of street photography depicting a longsince vanquished Upper West Side. Full of doubt, a lifelong city resident looks at his liberalism and doesn’t like what he sees. Constructed reality and documentary fiction, an unclassifiable masterpiece of ideas and technique that by all rights should be considered a landmark, had it not been virtually impossible to see. Directed by Manfred Kirchheimer & presented by the Cinema Conservancy Screening Series with a Q&A with Kirchheimer and Jacob Perlin from the Cinema Conservancy Screening Series to follow the screening.
Manfred (Manny) Kirchheimer is an independent filmmaker who has won awards here and abroad for such films as Art Is . . .The Permanent Revolution, SprayMasters, Tall, We Were So Beloved, Stations of the Elevated, Bridge High, Short Circuit, Claw, Leroy Douglas, Haiku, and Colossus on the River.
Kirchheimer has been producing and directing documentaries since 1965 with special emphasis on social issues, the built environment, art, and nature. His films have been shown around the world in theaters, on television and at festivals including New York, London, Berlin, Edinburgh, Venice, Melbourne, Sydney, Leipzig, Mannheim, Max Ophüls Preis (Saarbrücken), Gothenburg, Jerusalem, Montreal, and Athens, as well as the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Cinema du Reel in Paris , Rhythm of the Line (Berlin), and the Kennedy Center. Among the many museums that have showcased his work are the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Munich Filmmuseum, and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Retrospectives of Kirchheimer’s films have taken place at the Athens International Film Festival in Ohio, Sinking Creek Film Festival in Nashville, and at the Filmhaus in Saarbrücken, Germany. Kirchheimer teaches film at the School of Visual Arts in New York, lectures frequently at schools and universities, and makes films whenever he can raise the money. His latest film, Canners, is about street people who collect cans and bottles for a living,
Kirchheimer is listed in Who’s Who in Entertainment, Who’s Who in the East, and The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.
Curator Jacob Perlin is currently Director of Cinema Conservancy, a non-profit film distribution, production and consultation organization for American Independent Cinema. Founder The Film Desk. Former Associate Film Curator at BAMcinematek. Co-programmer of Jean-Luc Godard retrospective at 2013 New York Film Festival.
