“Rudy Burckhardt has been making films that give pleasure for over 35 years and is one of the major (though too rarely credited) figures in the development of American poetic cinema. ‘Pursuit of Happiness,' the title of an early film, sums up his aesthetic philosophy and the gentle tropisms toward pleasure which his camera makes. Trained in still photography and bringing that disciplined compositional eye to everything he sees, Burckhardt seeks out the spontaneous, half-funny, half-painful human gestures of pedestrians unaware that they are being watched. A candid voyeur, a spy, a harmless snoop, Burckhardt is a psychologist of retreating shoes and buildings as well as faces.... He has much in common with the democratic humanist tradition of Walt Whitman and Walker Evans, that ‘singing of America.'” Phillip Lopate

Included in tonight's show will be Burckhardt's latest film, Untilted (1983, 18 mins, color), a collage and sometime diary film which features dancer Yoshiko Chuma and her “School of Hard Knocks” and lines by John Ashbery. Earlier films on the program (some of which have been shown in Burckhardt's previous one-man shows at PFA) include: Haiti (1938, 15-1/2 mins); Under the Brooklyn Bridge (1955, 15 mins); Square Times--42nd Street (1967, 9 mins, color); and Default Averted (1975, 15 mins, color).