Andrew Shi

On Tuesday, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) held a screening and discussion of Swiss-American filmmaker, photographer and painter Rudy Burckhardt’s New York films in collaboration with painter Tom Burckhardt, the filmmaker’s son.

The museum screened four films made from the 1950s to the 1970s, highlighting the life and debris of New York.

The screening began and ended with scenes of destruction—still shots of a building being demolished floor by floor crossfade into each other in “Under the Brooklyn Bridge,” while a tractor struggles to climb piles of rubble in “Default Averted.”

In the discussion following the screening, Tom Burckhardt addressed the theme of destruction in the films, noting his father’s interest in the relationship between architecture and the human body. In “Square Times,” architecture serves as a stage for personal interactions, while hit songs by The Supremes play in the background.

In the absence of narrative, music and sound dominate the films. Burckhardt balances ambient noise, silence and the compositions of Thelonious Monk in “Default Averted” to build tension, and “Eastside Summer” centers multicultural communities in New York, responding to the influx of Puerto Rican immigration following World War II.

In the Q&A portion of the event, Tom Burckhardt affirmed the presence of themes of Americanization, noting how the transition in his father’s films towards centering people rather than architecture occurred as he developed familiarity with the city.

When asked what he finds most compelling about Rudy Burckhardt’s films in an interview with the Orient, Tom Burckhardt underscored the filmmaker’s ethos. Shot on site in the same manner as his street photographs, with what Tom Burckhardt refers to as “relaxed technical standards,” most of the footage taken ended up in the final products.

“This is something … totally different, this way of making films,” he said. “It really is like … being a painter where you’re just working … for yourself and … you put most of your self-worth of the project into that, not necessarily its so-called success,” he said.

Best known for his street photography of New York, Rudy Burckhardt applied the techniques and ethos of his photographs into his films. In the introduction to the screening, Tom Burckhardt described the aesthetic influence of still photography on his father’s films, which were shot entirely on a 16mm film camera. He likened them to vignettes, largely nonnarrative and reliant on a fixed camera.

BCMA Curator Casey Braun, who organized the event, expanded on the interdisciplinary nature of Rudy Burckhardt’s works.

“Rudy was really known as a photographer, particularly a street photographer in New York City … but seeing about possibilities, of moving between different media, ways that an artist can sort of capture what is good and interesting about one medium, and then do the same for another, even if there are things that sort of intersect in between them,” she said.

Tuesday’s event was an extension of the “Rudy Burckhardt: Three Maine Films” exhibition held at the BCMA this past summer, which was also curated by Braun. The previous exhibition displayed works filmed in Burckhardt’s family home in Searsmont, Maine.

“Burckhardt was actually known as a visual artist and a photographer but probably as more closely affiliated with New York City, where he lived and spent most of his career. So in some ways, the Maine films were a bit more of an outlier,” Braun said. I wanted an opportunity when students were back on campus to engage with other aspects of Burkhardt’s films.

Furthermore, Braun was optimistic that bringing Tom Burckhardt would provide guests with a unique perspective.

“[It’s] a great opportunity for students not only to view these short films, but, also, to have a chance to ask questions and to engage in dialogue with, in this case, not the filmmaker and the artist himself, but his son, who was deeply involved in making some of Burckhardt’s films in various ways,” she noted.

As well, Braun described her hopes for the screening of the New York films.

“What I’m hoping for this event is that members of the campus community and general public can be exposed to a broader array of Burckhardt’s filmmaking practices that reflect his deep interest in engaging with the places where he lives and works and also give people a chance to see New York City from the 1950s through the 1970s through his work,” she said.