Mid-1960s downtown artists turned razed urban sites into poetic film worlds.

Evidence

The mood is shabby and bucolic. Ferry Street’s weathered walls, water towers, sooty metal shutters, and ancient brick cobblestones provide an abandoned city in which Jacobs suggests more than stages a triangle involving Anne Frank (Karpf), miraculously spared, Jacobs’s alter ego Isadore Lhevinne (Dave Leveson), an obscure writer whose 1931 novel of the Russian Revolution, Napoleons All, Jacobs discovered in a used bookstore, and Maurice, a manic sharpie in a Panama hat (filmmaker Bob Cowan). Maurice functions as a creepy reality principle, lackadaisically mocking the oblique courtship of demure Anne and wistful Isadore: He presents her with various junk treasures, she hands him a glass of clear water that acts as a lens while, plugged into a transistor radio, Maurice dances by himself. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 999

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Sky Socialist as a double of Oldenburg’s Ray Gun productions — both mining demolition-era Lower Manhattan for material.