ECHOES OF SILENCE
dir. Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1965
76 mins. United States.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 - 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 - 7:30 PM

‘His people come to life simply and believably – more believably than most of the people in the Chabrol and Truffaut cinema… the film has a thematic and formal beauty that is remarkable.’ – Jonas Mekas

“The most exciting new filmmaker in recent years…. ECHOES OF SILENCE, his first film, is a stunning piece of work.’ – Susan Sontag

ECHOES OF SILENCE is a collection of gestures, glances, interspersed & unrelated, encounters both memorable and of the banal, the hyper-sexual & sensual movements of shadows, New York City’s somnambulist population of onlookers and the haunted and alienated youth who wander and go to art museums and coffee houses and fall in love and use each other and fuck, despairing collectively engulfed in their solitude.

Captured in a mode of poetic realism that borrows from the French New Wave, ECHOES establishes a new form of cinematic poetry featuring a documentary-like guerilla style, consistent with Mekas’ meandering Bolex and its contemporaries in the New York City underground. Goldman’s 1965 debut is a staggering piece of original cinema featuring a non-diegetic soundtrack that incorporates the filmmaker’s own vinyl collection along with photography, watercolor paintings and handwritten text. This is essential cinema for the underground: a ballad for New York in the early Sixties, a despairing ode to being twenty-something and searching for something more.

“The Sixties was personal, mostly desperation and despair, the torn lining of the glowing coat. We were lost souls, echoes of broken glass. It was cafes and conversation, folk music, poetry, sexual hunger, irreconcilable conflicts, despair, aimlessness and chaos.” – Peter Emanuel Goldman

Special thanks to Peter Emanuel Goldman, Balthazar Clementi and Pip Chodorov of Re:Voir.