Film Forum

"If Times Square is near, can Heaven be far?" – Ken Jacobs.

Program includes:
Broadway by Light (William Klein, 1954) 35mm
Time Squared (Branda Miller, 1988) Digital
Night Crawlers (Peter E. Goldman, 1964) 16mm
Jane in Peepland (Charlie Ahearn, art by Jane Dickson, 1993) Digital
Square Times (Rudy Burckhardt, 1967) 16mm
Sketches for Late City Final (Jem Cohen, Peter Hutton, Jeff Preiss, Adam Grossman Cohen, co-produced by Fred Riedel, c. 1991) Digital transfer of VHS from 16mm/Super 8/Hi-8 from 3/4" U-matic edit

A note from Jem Cohen on Sketches for Late City Final:

In the late 80s and into the 90s four street-shooting filmmakers worked to register the territory known as 42nd St./Times Square. Each shot with their own approach and vision; the plan was for the footage to be conjoined into an omnibus film for which I came up with the title, Late City Final. No one knew what the final result would be, only that we weren’t interested in a straight documentary. There was some urgency, as the area was on the brink of some massive, to-be-determined transformation. Disneyfication was still a concept, not a real estate plan, but the writing was on the wall. It was hard to drum up interest in the project, much less funding. Whatever it might have been, it didn’t seem to fit into proscribed notions of what a film was supposed to be, and that’s likely still true today, perhaps even more so. Footage was eventually remanded to each filmmaker and the project slipped away. Peter is gone, the rest of us will someday re-surface our material in whatever forms it takes. What you have here is not an excerpt but a crude sketch made on the failed path to garnering support, rendered exponentially cruder via many technical (de)generations. Phantom footage of a phantom landscape.