The city symphony is more than a genre of cinema, it's a preoccupation. With each successive generation of image-makers it is revived, suffused with new vitality and meaning. One of the most enthralling of contemporary practitioners, Jem Cohen portrays the city as haunted terrain, filled with chill facades and ghostlike inhabitants. Negotiating the borders between narrative and documentary, he captures hidden histories secreted in chance encounters, aqueous light, and architectural debris. Cohen's most recent work, Lost Book Found (1996, 36 mins), centers around a curious ledger containing obtuse listings about the city of New York. The notebook's scribblings are an unknown author's obsessive attempt to construct a taxonomy, an order for the chaos of the modern city. Dedicated to Walter Benjamin, Lost Book Found takes on the stance of the "flaneur," sorting through the resonant surfaces of the metropolis. Fitful, luscious rhythms and starkly sensuous images compound the enigmatic quality of what Cohen calls the "city as repository and ruin." Along with this premiere, we screen excerpts from two earlier works: Just Hold Still (1989), poetic fragments that merge vérité footage and dramatic tableau, and Buried in Light (1994), a symphonic look at the cities of Berlin, Dresden, Krakow, Budapest, and Prague in the age of capital.-Steve Seid