UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art

“I wonder why life is so damn hard”.

  Britton, South Dakota (2003) begins without titles. When the screen fills with even-toned black and white images of children posed on the main drag of some small American town, you must rely on contextual clues to situate this scene. The film’s texture, and the scratches and tears...

The “City Symphony” is not a coherent cinematic tradition, but a syncretic notion cradled at the intersection of three films made between 1926 and 1929: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), and Dziga Vertov’s Man...

Rather than dampening the excitement around vérité filmmaking, David Holzman's Diary instead announced the birth of a whole new documentary subgenre.

In December, UnionDocs hosted Peter Hutton, one of the avant-garde’s most accomplished filmmakers, for an evening of four films: three old pieces, and footage from a work-in-progress. Since the late 1970s with the first New York Portrait (1978-79), most of Hutton’s films have been short...