Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

AMERICA – EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER DREAMED OF (AND MORE): TONY GANZ + RHODY STREETER, PART 2

August 28 – August 31

August 28-31, 2026

In the summer of 2024, Anthology teamed up with The Film Desk to shine a spotlight on the inimitable work of Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter, who for a short but glorious period in the early 1970s conjured a series of exquisite and hilarious short films about various (often bizarre) corners of U.S. culture and society. The films they created together proved to be a true revelation – and happily, it turns out there’s more where that came from!

This follow up to the earlier series features a brand-new 16mm restoration by the New York Public Library of one of the highlights of that 2024 program – MUZAK – as well as more than half a dozen films that have come to light since then, all of which are as funny as they are unsettling, as affectionate as they are trenchant, and made with a refreshing concision that belies the depth of their cultural and social observations. Featured in their day on the public television series “The Great American Dream Machine” and “The 51st State,” and screened in the 1970s at MoMA, Film Forum and the Whitney Museum, as well as in a program curated by Amos Vogel at the Annenberg School for Communication, Ganz and Streeter’s work (which was produced under the banner of Tunbridge Films) later fell into obscurity, kept alive only through the devoted efforts of various film collectors and programmers, until Jake Perlin and The Film Desk unearthed and restored a number of them, leading to Anthology’s earlier series. Turning their mordant, deadpan eye on a wide variety of uniquely American phenomena – including, in this new batch of rediscoveries, a Times Square emporium of oddities, a NYC horse stable, and the social scene at a local Baskin Robbins ice cream shop – Streeter and Ganz’s films deserve to be set alongside such masterpieces of satirical Americana as Errol Morris’s early films, Garry Winogrand’s photographs, and John Wilson’s short films and television work.

Alongside the new program, we’ll be presenting a couple encore screenings of the original lineup as well!
“Kitsch hotels for newly-weds, well-fed Jesus freaks, plastic retirement villages, Muzak executives who confirm one’s worst suspicions: these slashing self-indictments – entirely documentary – are among the most controversial political films in America today.” –Amos Vogel, 1974

“Amazing collection of short portraits – the invention of Muzak, a hotline for people that just need to talk, etiquette classes, billboard painters. I especially connect to the one they filmed at the Cove Haven honeymoon hotel – somewhere I’ve been to many times.” –John Wilson

Special thanks to Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter; Jake Perlin & Andrew Adair (The Film Desk); and Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL).

Tony Ganz will be here in person for selected screenings!

Upcoming Screenings

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