An impressionistic short film celebrating Stockholm’s rhythms of life, blending images of its streets, waterways, people, and architecture into a visual “symphony.” Winner of the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Short Subject, One-Reel in 1949 — the first Swedish film ever to receive an Oscar.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
Berlin, die Symphonie der Großstadt
1927
7
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
Человек с киноаппаратом
1929
7
Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.
I Am Belfast
2016
6
This visual symphony celebrates Madison, Wisconsin's beautiful Lake Mendota and the community that brings it to life.
Mendota: Symphony of a Lake
2025
0
"The theme of the film HIDDEN CITIES is personal urban perceptions, which we call 'the city'. The city, as a living organism, reflecting social processes and interactions, economic relations, political conditions and private matters. In the city, human memories, desires and tragedies find expression in the form of designations and marks engraved in house walls and paving slabs. But what the city really is under this thick layer of signs, what it contains or conceals, is what we are researching in the HIDDEN CITIES project. The source material for the film are 9 sequential photo works created by Gusztáv Hámos between 1975 and 2010. Each of these 'city perceptions' depicts essential situations of urban experiences containing human and inhuman acts in a compact form. The cities in which the photo sequences have been made are Berlin, Budapest and New York – places with a traumatised past: Wars, dictatorships, terrorist catastrophes."
Hidden Cities
2010
0
An experimental meditation on Times Square's marquees and iconic advertising that captures the concurrently seedy and dazzling aspects of New York's Great White Way.
Broadway by Light
1958
6
Waterpark
2013
8
Passersby
2023
0
LONDON SYMPHONY is a brand new silent film - a city symphony - which offers a poetic journey through the city of London. It is an artistic snapshot of the city as it stands today, and a celebration of its culture and diversity.
London Symphony
2017
7
"The Hart of London" is an endlessly layered tour de force. It explores life and death, the sense of place and personal displacement, and the intricate aesthetics of representation. It is a personal and spiritual film, marked inevitably by Chambers’s knowledge that he had leukemia. The late American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage said of Hart, "If I named the five greatest films [ever made], this has got to be one of them." Even this high praise falls short of hyperbole. The Hart of London is at the centre of Chambers’s extraordinary achievement.
The Hart of London
1970
7
A frenetic found-footage documentary made entirely from “lost” unlabeled media on YouTube - weaving together nearly a thousand raw videos, each mistakenly or mindlessly uploaded under a generic filename (e.g., IMG 1326, IMG 5493…).
IMG 0000
2023
0
A personal city symphony where an eco-anxious soul explores the intersections of natural and artificial. The filmmaker’s internal conflicts are reflected through the contradictions of early spring. This experimental short documentary invites the viewer to take the time and truly pay attention to one’s surroundings.
Varasele valu
2024
0
Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring explores the history ofYellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents incomical scenes: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village's water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history-their ancestors' settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio's Trail of Tears- among other more personal details of village life. The wording of their recollections is imperfect, unsure-in fact they are all re-stagings of their previous audio interviews. Through performing their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time and storytelling.
Sound Spring
2025
0
Gubara was proud of the first color film in African cinema, which attempts to give an African response to the city symphony genre by capturing disparate images of daily life in Khartoum and setting it to music, particularly romantic Arabic songs.
Song of Khartoum
1955
0
Pikk Street is one of the most important thoroughfares of Tallinn’s Old Town. The picture playfully combines hidden camera footage with more observational images, employing shots from unusual angles; these are accompanied by specific sounds and interesting musical themes. The result is a true cinematic adventure.
Pikk tänav
1966
0
Last of a London Summer
2017
0
An audio-visual experience through the perspective of an iPhone depicting a harmonious city during the day quickly descend into technological madness as night falls.
Transmission
2025
0
Peter Hutton's New York trilogy. An act of urban archaeology, a chronicle of indelible impressions of the city.
New York Portrait
1990
0
A "city symphony" film, produced to encourage Photographic Society of America members to attend their 1963 conference in Chicago, City to See is a surprising film. It combines footage of Chicago with a deadpan commentary that pokes fun commercial travel films: "Chicago is my town," the narrator says wryly, "and no other town will do." Conneely was awarded a special prize by the Photographic Society of America for this film.
Chicago: The City To See in '63
0
Tourists eating and taking photos. Tourists strolling and taking photos. Tourists bathing on the beach and taking more photos. Barcelona has become an overexploited photocall to the point of paroxysm, and this is what this film shows by turning the camera and pointing towards the visitors. A small gesture that, added to a powerful sound contrast and a caustic sense of humour, exposes without subterfuge a grotesque normality.
1,2,3... Barcelona!
2025
0