Pestilent City1967

Unspooling without dialog and with visionary, hair-raising force, Peter Emanuel Goldman's disquieting lyric is less a "city symphony" than dirge, a kind of prelude to TAXI DRIVER. Negative photography, slow motion and plain attentiveness to the everyday uncanny are all marshaled to reveal the incipient terror underlying crosstown traffic. Goldman's New York is a city of solitude and his PESTILENT CITY a vast catalog of vacant stares and the private frenzies of madness, lust and shopping. - Max Goldberg