2003 (US)
16 mm, 32 minutes
* Foreign City studies New York as a place of immigration and
displacement. It is a meditation on revolution of the urban space. Its
abstract black-and- white images and actual sounds, come in and out of synch,
creating a magical foreign landscape. The reconstruction of N.Y. through an
imaginary city plan, built on sensation. The film has a timeless, anonymous
quality until it is given the voice of artist and jazz musician Marion Brown.
- Robert Fenz.
* Mr. Fenz's film is a cinematic poem that surveys the grimier neighborhoods
of New York City, mostly at night, and goes on a subway ride to Harlem. The
accumulated images and accompanying soundtrack of the city portray New York
as a mysterious, alien place of ominous power and unending restlessness. At
the center of the film is an autobiographical monologue by the aged artist
and jazz musician Marion Brown, delivered in a voice that is at once proud
and fatigued. His experiences and his music fuse with the urban imagery to
create an intimate slow dance between art and the city in which they collapse
into each other like weary partners at the end of a dance marathon. - Stephen
Holden, The New York Times, October 18, 2003.
* The final film in Fenz's series "Meditations on Revolution." The film is
dedicated to the director's father who immigrated to the United States in
1953 and passed away in 1999.
Source: HM, Film Society of Lincoln Center
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