Opening
Fri 01.11.
19:00
Cinema
Arsenal 1
Director
Jay Leyda
USA / 1931
14 min.
/ 35 mm
/ Silent
After growing up in Dayton, Ohio, Jay Leyda moved to New York in 1930 at the age of twenty to gather practical experience in experimental camerawork as the assistant of photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner. “My desire to work creatively for cinema is older than my knowledge of the American workers’ movement, let alone my involvement in it”, wrote Leyda in 1933 in his application letter to the Soviet film studio Mezhrabpom and traced his belated politicization to his lower middle class background. The milieu of photographers and filmmakers he experienced in his first years in New York was all the more formative for him as a result – Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Sidney Meyers, Irving Lerner, Willard van Dyke, Leo Hurwitz and many more, who experimented with the possibilities of film and photography and grasped doing so as a political practice. As a reaction to the global economic crises, they teamed up to form the Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) in 1931 and placed their work at the service of the “exploited classes”.
It was within the orbit of the League that Leyda made the short film A BRONX MORNING, a look brimming with curiosity at the New York neighborhood where he lived and which was then a white working class district.
Director
Mikhail Kaufman
USSR / 1929
66 min.
/ 35 mm
For the opening of the film series, Leyda’s debut film will be shown with Mikhail Kaufman’s VESNOJ, whose theme is the thaws, awakenings and explosions of spring. The opening program begins with a keynote speech by film scholar Masha Salazkina (Concordia University, Montreal). The films will be accompanied by a real-time composition on analogue instruments by Berlin-based Visual Artist, musician and performer Satch Hoyt. With his long-term project Afro-Sonic Mapping at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hoyt has tapped into a transnational, diasporic history of sound that invites audiences to listen in new ways.
The print of BRONX MORNING comes from the Austrian Film Museum, VESNOJ is provided by the eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam.
Funded by:
