Seeing Symphonically

<p><b>Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.</b></p><p>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? <i>Seeing Symphonically</i> 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 utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects suburbanization and high-rise public housing the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage optical effects and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics particularly their rhythms and through those same rhythms envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs outside the demands of capital.</p>