Film Forum

In the tradition of New York’s greatest street photographers, Manny Kirchheimer’s FREE TIME is a new film based on lustrous B&W footage he and Walter Hess shot throughout the city from 1958-1960. New York’s stately architectural beauty contrasts with rough and raw scenes of kids playing stickball, window washers balancing precariously, and stoop-sitters reading the paper or daydreaming. The ways in which life in Washington Heights differs from Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper West Side, or the Financial District are captured with a sensitive, loving eye and an ear for the musical rhythms of city life.

FREE TIME
USA    1960 / 2020    61 MINS.    CINEMA CONSERVANCY

BRIDGE HIGH
USA    1975    10 MINS

Reviews

On FREE TIME:

“[Kirchheimer is] one of the great documentary filmmakers.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“A beautiful portrait of youth, decay, and solitude in New York City. There is power in silence. This 60-minute exploration of New York City speaks louder than most films. Kirchheimer’s 60-year-career fundamentally consists of nonfictional love letters to the sprawling urban landscape of NYC. Kirchheimer’s editing transforms the city into a living creature. The atmosphere morphs form tranquil to crushing with a simple dissolve. Time cannot be stopped, only endured… Reading between the lines is rarely this rewarding. A pensive meditation on the mundanity of the metropolitan landscape.”
– Jonathan Christian, The Playlist

“A jazzy montage of exquisitely lensed Manhattan street scenes - musical passages from the likes of Bach and Basie share a soundtrack with select cues… In FREE TIME, you don’t hear noise, you hear notes.”
– Eric Hynes, Film Comment

“A poetic film. Lyrically evokes leisurely summer days in New York. Filled with the beauty of the everyday. Serenely buoyant.”
– Leonard Quart, Cineaste