Rudy Burckhardt

"The story of a shipwrecked baby reared by a kindly animal. See Tarzam, the beast-man, invent the art of painting. He meets his first human. His scene deepens from innocence to corruption and to final violence. Taylor is sublime, as always. The text is his, of course." – Edwin Denby *Contains a scene where "Tarzam" (played by Mead) gets sick from eating berries and is cured when a missionary doctor, played by Edwin Denby, administers an enema.

A silent screen-type comedy starring Edwin Denby as Hemlock Stinge, the unlovable billionaire.

A short film by the painter Yvonne Jacquette.

"This filmic slice of life coalesces into an ethnographic view of a possible future: the city as a constantly bubbling, delirious playground where yesterday’s monuments are symbols to be triumphed over, and tomorrow never arrives. Perhaps this is why the ultimate effect is one of wistfulness, due also to the unexpected intrusion of a memento mori in the guise of a nude traversing the Maine woods…" - Trevor Winkfield

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.

A film-dance, shot on 16mm film in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

Short film by Swiss-American film-maker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, featuring a poem by Kenneth Koch.

A travelogue of Port-au-Prince, Haiti concentrating on the daily life and rhythm of tropical island life.

Elliott Carter’s composition of the same title inspired Rudy Burckhardt, in collaboration with Yvonne Jacquette, to photograph this collage-style film. Mostly shot in New York City, but also in Hong Kong and Searsmont, Maine.

A detailed look at a remarkable artist who died in 1999 at age 85. Aspects of Burckhardt's work in photography, film, and painting are examined in interviews with Rudy Burckhardt, painter Yvonne Jacquette, and curators Robert Storr (former Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Brian Wallis (Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York). In his studio in New York, Burckhardt discusses his photography and its significance within its historical framework. In the woods near his summer home in Maine, the viewer sees Burckhardt's easel and painting in front of the scene he is depicting. Whether in city or country, Burckhardt appreciated and transformed the chaos he discovered.

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"The movie opens with a banana still-life vignette seen ripening through time-lapse photography for several days on a rooftop. The energy-charged New York Marathon follows, suggesting the rush of locations and pace about to unfold. The sense of traveling is persistent, we are taken from the marathon in New York, to breakfast in Maine, back to busy city streets, to the Grand Canyon, sky, the dancer Dana Reitz working out in the woods, poets posing, and the journey goes on. There is hardly a breather. Lines of David Shapiro's poem 'When a Man loves a Woman' are printed occasionally across the screen In one segment we hear Alice Notley read her poem 'A Woman comes into the Room.' Essentially a collage of images and sound, the precise order of events is unimportant. Overlays of time, season and location become fulfilling and cumulative experience, the particular sequences like cuts on a diamond." – Joe Giordano

“Happy with his luscious daughter Aurora in a rustic setting, Professor Borealis has devised an improved brain and is ready to transplant it. The humor is tenderly black. Burckhardt's fusion of documentary-type photography with fairytale storyline is nearer Keystone than avant-garde with its visual honesty and particular virtuosity.” — Edwin Denby

With music by Elliott Carter adding drama and richness, a surreal dance by Dana Reitz and Alice Notley reading her poem "I work in a whorehouse, I seem to like it/it is dark like a cave, with pink light..." We visit briefly New York, Provincetown, Martinique, Hong Kong, ending in the dark woods of Maine, with glimpses of women, peculiar, sometimes erotic, always fleeting.

A snapshot from the filmmaker's own life in rural Maine.

"A pseudo-educational, fictitious documentary survey of the ups, downs, ins and far-outs of Dope. Very funny and slightly sinister, like Red Skelton in the sky with diamonds." - Ron Padgett

A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats the park as an outdoor aviary.

A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park shared by birds, the young and the old.

A soldier on a weekend pass, with Kodachrome in his camera, takes a leisurely walk on both sides of the tracks. Piano by Earl Hines.

"a film that looks forward to the many collage films Burckhardt has made in the last two decades. Shot in Maine in black and white, it demonstrates Burckhardt's ability to take seemingly slight subjects -- flowers, fields, a pond -- and invest them with consequence by the simple act of looking. Instead of thinking about a daisy, compiling a list of its literary references, and planning a rise-and-fall drama based on a mental construct, Burckhardt simply sets out with his camera and films. As he shoots, he goes closer and closer to his chosen subject, putting the viewer into a trance, intoxicated by textures of petals, the myriad-flowered center, the unchoreographed dance the daisy makes on a breezy day. " - Mobile Homes: The Art of Rudy Burckhardt, Institut d'Art Modern, Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain,1998.