Event

Peter Emmanuel Goldman

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Goldman was just 23 when he started to make his first film, Echoes of silence, in 16 mm and on a shoestring, following three friends around Greenwich Village and Times Square. With great sensibility and a constant background of jazz music, the film records the moods of youth, the pursuit of amorous encounters, nights in cafés and wandering alone among the crowds. Susan Sontag called Goldman “the most exciting filmmaker in recent years”. The film was banned in France and Italy, but at the Pesaro Festival it received the Special Prize (awarded by, among others, Godard and Bertolucci), and Jonas Mekas praised it, among other aspects, for the way it “addressed ‘forbidden’ themes, such as homosexual relations. In general, this theme becomes vulgar or sensationalistic in the cinema. Here it is beautiful and sad”. Echoes of silence, bringing together realistic authenticity with the poetry of experience, is an essential work of New American Cinema.

Recommended By Duncan Hines, 1964, 4 min; Night Crawlers, 1964, 4 min; Echoes of Silence, 1964, 75 min. 16 mm screening.