Compiled from more than 1,000 still photographs, the Israeli-born US-based director Ynon Lan’s short film NYC Textures transforms some of New York’s most ubiquitous sights – from the city’s brick walls and subway steps to the grass and bark of Central Park – into an energetic, jazzy abstraction. Or it’s a day’s worth of brisk urban walking condensed into a minute and a half.
videoCities
Walt Whitman’s poetry frames scenes from 1920s New York in this film classic
10 minutes
videoSubcultures
New York City, 1986 – the grit, the graffiti, the glory
18 minutes
videoCities
Scenes from Midtown Manhattan form a ‘play of texture, rhythm and interruptions’
5 minutes
videoCities
Rituals of leisure on the grass one sunny day in Central Park
3 minutes
videoHistory of technology
Racing through time on a Brooklyn Bridge trolley ride in 1899
9 minutes
videoCities
What happens at the all-night corner shop before sunrise
7 minutes
videoCities
Time dilates and people flow in and out of each other in a hallucinatory urban commute
3 minutes
videoArchitecture
A whirlwind tour of Hong Kong’s high-rises is an awesome meditation on urbanity
9 minutes
videoSocial psychology
How does a city process tragedy? Ordinary people’s first raw responses to 9/11
8 minutes