Twenty five years ago, Jem Cohen completed Lost Book Found, a semi-fictional diary film that draws from his experience as a pushcart vendor in lower Manhattan. The work is crafted from what such a vendor might have seen and heard: bits of paper and plastic swirling ghostlike in eddies of wind; weathered storefronts; window displays crowded with tchotchkes; enigmatic notes taped to streetlights; disassociated recordings of sales pitches, passing conversations, and the sounds of machines at work; unlovely aggregations of cardboard; evening skylines glowing in fog.

Except for a sequence at the film’s end, the images in Lost Book Found are recorded entirely on Super 8, framed at times with a skyward tilt, canting everyday pedestrians into oneiric angles, as if snatches of an expressionist film of the 1920s were transposed onto late-capitalist America. This is not the authoritative, acquisitional mode of conventional documentary, but a view from below, from one of the street’s own participants. “Its beauty is quite ineffable. It’s the sort of visual experience that transforms everything seen by the viewer for several hours afterward,” Luc Sante observed of the movie. “What it actually does is capture the subconscious of the city itself, the dream state of the whole past existing in simultaneous disarray.”

Looking at Lost Book Found today, on the other side of the millennium and in the midst of a global pandemic, one cannot help but think of the depopulated streets of Manhattan and its newly muted rhythms. Now, in the relative absence of both bustling commuters and slow-moving tourists, a layer has been peeled back, revealing what Cohen has trained us to see: the city as a vast reliquary of its own history.

Lost.Book.Found.Jem.Cohen.1996.1080p.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	36 min 30 s
Size: 	1.16 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 285 kb/s
BPP: 	0.086
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 253 kb/s (Audio Track)

https://nitro.download/view/E4F0C0A29B5F126/Lost.Book.Found.Jem.Cohen.1996.1080p.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Jem Cohen – Lost Book Found (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Instrument is a documentary film directed by Jem Cohen about the band Fugazi. Cohen’s relationship with band member Ian MacKaye extends back to the 1970s when the two met in high school in Washington, D.C.. The film takes its title from the Fugazi song of the same name, from their 1993 album, In on the Kill Taker.
Editing of the film was done by both Cohen and the members of the band over the course of five years. It was shot from 1987 through 1998 on super 8, 16mm and video and is composed mainly of footage of concerts, interviews with the band members, practices, tours and time spent in the studio recording their 1995 album, Red Medicine.
The film also includes portraits of fans as well as interviews with them at various Fugazi shows around the United States throughout the years.

2.53GB | 1h 56m | 708×462 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/21A4563917C6A8C/Instrument.1998.DVDRip.x264-FiZ.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Jem Cohen – Instrument: Ten Years with the Band Fugazi (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Fifteen distinct but interconnected chapters, shot in locations from Russia to New York City to Istanbul. Together, these build to a reckoning at the intersection of city symphony, diary, and essay film. Perhaps the most personal of Cohen’s documentary works, COUNTING measures street life, light, and time, noting not only surveillance and over-development but resistance and its phantoms as manifested in music, animals and everyday magic.

1.69GB | 1 h 51 min | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/720A5886D215537/Counting.2015.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/203EF074BBF9D9A/Counting.2015.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.part2.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Jem Cohen – Counting (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“A meditation on history, memory, and change in Central and Eastern Europe, Buried in Light is a non-narrative journey, a cinematic collage. Cohen’s “search for images” began at a time of extraordinary flux, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled—opening borders yet ushering in a nascent wave of consumer capitalism. What he saw struck him as a profound paradox: the moment Eastern Europe was revealed was simultaneously the moment it was hidden by the blinding light of commercialism. Cohen’s images are neither the tourist’s roster of picturesque vistas and monuments, nor the mass media’s definitive catalog of dramatic moments. Instead, he focuses on details, ordinary objects, and forgotten places—filming daily life as seen on the street.”
—Linda Dubler, Art at the Edge (Atlanta: High Museum of Art)

“Cohen’s video was shot mostly on super-8 and has a characteristically grainy, dreamy look, integrating excerpts from foreign language phrase books in an attempt to express the widespread alienation produced by this transition. Cohen traveled far and wide, from Dresden to Prague, and ruminates not only on the fate of communism but the continuing impact of World War II (there is a poignant sequence shot in Auschwitz). Despite the comic relief provided by the phrase book, the video is extremely melancholy, painting the East in drab, dark colors and showing everything in terms of decay.”

643MB | 1h 1mn | 706×529 | avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/E6ADA9471EFE83E/Buried_in_Light.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Jem Cohen – Buried in Light (1994) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

One of Jem Cohens first films (his third), conducted on Super 8 camera in 1987-88, consisting of impressionistic shots of urban development and decay. An impressive short piece (not least considering its year of production!) pointing ahead to his masterful ‘Lost book found’.

This is a VHS-rip with mid-quality; picture a bit grainy and muddled, but generally ok. Sound is quite good (contains soundtrack by Jem Cohen and a track by a.o. Butthole Surfers).

“This is a History of New York” constructs a fictional landscape of the city from prehistory to the Space Age. Cohen uses an evocative soundtrack to compile genres of architecture and visual arts into a hybridized evolution of New York City. Although the videomaker’s intent was to create an accessible street document, on an abstract level, the tape inquires if the Great Ages of Man might not co-exist here and now, before our very eyes.

https://nitro.download/view/3C5AD25402846B5/Jem_Cohen_-_This_Is_a_History_of_New_York_(1987).avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

The post Jem Cohen – This Is a History of New York (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

The first part concerns a personal, poetic approach to narrative and includes 4:44 (From Her House Home), Never Change (with Blake Nelson), Love Teller (with Ben Katchor), and Light Years. The second part involves hybridized use of verité footage and the confrontation of documentary concerns with the music video format and includes Selected City Films, Glue Man (with Ian MacKaye), and Talk about the Passion (with R.E.M). The work can be considered as a whole, or each piece in the project can be viewed (and rented) as a separate entity.

https://nitro.download/view/362EFC613276A12/Just_Hold_Still.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

The post Jem Cohen – Just Hold Still (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, “The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship. I would say that Drink Deep is both unabashedly and deceptively romantic. Surface, flow, and undertow. What looks like paradise is always paradise lost.”

Music composed by Stephen Vitiello and performed with Gabriel Cohen and Mary Wooten.

https://nitro.download/view/CA43736F609A4E0/Drink_Deep.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Jem Cohen – Drink Deep (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.