Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

WHAT IS THE CITY BUT THE PEOPLE?

December 4 – December 14

December 4-14, 2026

This series takes its name from a 1969 piece of municipal propaganda bankrolled by the New York Department of City Planning. The film opens with a bad-trip montage of the city rife with blood and violence, chaos in the streets, and apocalyptic messages of despair, then suggests that the way out of that nightmare vision is for the city to make another attempt at “urban renewal.”

This might seem like a strange namesake for a series that aims – as this one does – to celebrate New York City. But like all good propaganda, WHAT IS THE CITY contains enough grains of truth to keep audiences on board. “The city really has to start to think in terms of people. Is it any wonder our city is in the condition it’s in?” a West Midtown resident asks, having learned that her home is about to be leveled for a massive development project. Taken together, these films offer a vision of the city organized along the terms she suggests: people and their neighborhoods, their languages, their ways of playing, cooking, eating, hustling, their desire for safety, and the sacrifices they make out of love.

The earliest films in the series were made in the lead-up to the mid-70s fiscal crisis with its attendant disinvestment, displacement, and “planned shrinkage” of low-income communities. Several later films depict the crisis’s fallout, in which leaders prioritized finance above all – certainly above the vast majority of city residents’ quality of life. Each of these films was made when New Yorkers could move through the city relatively unwatched, before the era of hyper-surveillance ushered in by 9/11. Here, we can look at the city before it was looking back quite so hard.

Just before the first of these films were made, a school of thought about city life was taking shape (one of its pioneers was William H. Whyte, the narrator of WHAT IS THE CITY, who would go on to make THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES). These thinkers shifted focus from cars and “machines for living in”-style tower blocks toward the ways bodies and spaces shape our interactions, our work, our fun, our claustrophobia. Although some of these thinkers, perhaps unwittingly, played into the hands of developers and the forces of privatization, their focus on people had an undeniable impact on New York in the decades that followed. This series, informed by that impact, meditates on the dream of a city designed by and for its residents, focusing on what animates, binds, and too often divides New York City’s communities.

Ornette Coleman summed it up when he noted of his Prince Street apartment building in 1970, “Friends and neighbors – that’s where it’s at.” No municipal PR effort, no amount of privatization, no tsunami of global capital can wash them away.

This series has been guest-programmed by Lauren Lee White, who wrote the introduction above.

Special thanks to Liz Andersen; Ben Blackwood (Michael Blackwood Productions Inc.); Sarah Brennan (Alexander Street); Keri Butler (Municipal Art Society of New York); McLain Clutter; Nick Fraccaro; Tony Ganz; Anjelica James (WNET); Tana Jamieson; Karen L. Kramer; Ana Marie (XFR Collective); Matt McKinzie & Julia Petrocelli (Film-Maker’s Coop); Jake Perlin & Andrew Adair (The Film Desk); Erik Piil (DCTV); Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL); George Schmalz (Kino Lorber); Sandra Schulberg & Kirsten Larvick (IndieCollect); Carol Stein; Rhody Streeter; JT Takagi, Roselly Torres, and Shu Wang (Third World Newsreel); and Susan Wittenberg.

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