Rudy & Jacob Burckhardt films on PennSound Cinema

The Automotive Story, 1954
A Cittadura Documentary

Rudy Burckhardt, Director
Jane Freilicher, Narration
Kenneth Koch, Text
Debussy, Poulenc, and Scriabin, Piano Music
Frank O'Hara, Music Player

Read the full transcription of a 1976 radio interview with Rudy Burckhardt about Automotive Story at Jacket Magazine.

Central Park in the Dark, NYC, New York, 1985
A Collaboration with Charles Ives, Christopher Sweet and Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks

Rudy Burckhardt, Director
Christopher Sweet, Director
Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks, Dance Choreography
Charles Ives, Music

"Lurking crime and lingering desire change the atmosphere of this brief but affecting film. The light changes moment by moment. The season is shifting. Figures move like phantoms in the penumbra. Beethoven glowers against the evening; a perfect Alice polishes bronze with her petticoat; traffic in diamonds and rubies twines its way among the trees; snarling youths self-destruct. The false promises of youth, beauty and art are the smoke out the windows of fire along Fifth Avenue."
-- Christopher Sweet

Jacob Burckhardt
Yaknetuma from the Lower East, New York City, NY, 1974
A collaboration with Laleen Jayamann


"…such varied delights as noted film critic and theoretician Laleen Jayamanne performing a Sri Lankian ritual dance on a tenement rooftop after polishing off a 32-oz. beer in 'Yaknetuma From the Lower East Side'…” -- Bruce Bennett, the New York Sun

Rudy Burckhardt: New PennSound page
Jacob Burckhardt: New PennSound page
PennSound Cinema