A new film series at Lincoln Center spotlights films about NYC

A new film series kicks off at Lincoln Center on Friday and spotlights more than 30 films made in and about New York City.

“ Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York ,” features documentaries and experimental films from the collection of the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, the legendary film nonprofit founded in 1961 by Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage among others.

The artist-run organization gives filmmakers full control of their own work, aims to promote its collection around the world, and hosts sponsorships.

Dan Sullivan, a programmer at Film at Lincoln Center, said the broad range of films in the series felt like a more authentic way to engage with the idea of New York City than is often found in film.

“New York is perhaps the most represented city in all of cinema, but people are generally familiar with how it’s been portrayed in commercial fiction films,” Sullivan said. “The view from the underground is just as rich, if not even richer.”

The series includes films from other giants of the experimental cinema world such as Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker, and even Arthur “Weegee” Felig, the famed black and white street photographer who turned to filmmaking later in his career. Many of the films are shown on 16 mm prints.

The films are grouped into 10 themed programs such as “ Moving Through the Metropolis: Transit Images ” and “ Off to the Beach: Coney Island ,” which features five films about Coney Island made between 1965 and 2012.

Other programs look at familiar neighborhoods or aspects of New York through new eyes, such as the four-film program “ On the Loisaida and the Streets of the South Bronx .”

“These are places that in film history have been treated extremely divisively, problematically,” said Tom Day, executive director of the Film Maker’s Cooperative, referring to the Loisaida film series. “But these are films made by people who lived amongst these communities, lived within these spaces, and they were able to articulate a vision much more grounded in reality.”

Some are quite political, such as a two-part program called “Gentrification and Urban Renewal ,” a controversial term popularized in the 1950s and ‘60s that refers to the practice of clearing low-income housing to make way for new developments.

Lincoln Center does not spare its own complicity in such projects – one of the films documents the rubble of San Juan Hill, the Puerto Rican neighborhood, made famous in “West Side Story,” that was destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center.

A 1971 film titled “Break and Enter a.k.a. Squatters / Rompiendo Puertas” was made by the radical film collective Newsreel. It documents a group of Puerto Rican and Dominican activists who took over abandoned buildings throughout the city and renovated them into homes. They called the project “Operation Move-In.”

“Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York” runs from Friday, May 3 through Tuesday, May 7 at Lincoln Center. For more information, visit Film at Lincoln Center's website . General admission tickets start at $17.