ECHOES OF SILENCE - PETER EMMANUEL GOLDMAN & SUSAN SONTAG - 1965

Haunted, lonely faces and a magical trip through an art museum in masterpierce of New york underground.








Desperate sexuality, desperate emotions; every gesture and inflection an act of grave import; a film of young adults, infused with a new existentialist humanism, devoid of certainty or illusion. The sharp contrast and graininess of the still indicate the film's distance from slick commercial cinema. A major new talent." - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

"His people come to life simply and believably - more believably than most of the people in the Chabrol and Truffaut cinema...the film has a thematic and formal beauty that is remarkable." - Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal

"All the American film-makers we admire came into the cinema young. Now they're old but no one's taking their place. When Hawks started out he was the same age as Goldman and Goldman is alone...There will be other great American film-makers (there's already Goldman, Clarke and Cassavetes)." - Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema

Peter Emmanuel Goldman's rarely screened debut, an underappreciated landmark of the New American Cinema, chronicles the lives of twenty-somethings adrift in New York City, finding tremendous pathos in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, girls putting on makeup, a stroll beneath the pulsing lights of Times Square marquees. Composed with a lo-fi purity and bereft of diegetic sound, its shadowy images of youthful flaneurs are paired with evocatively hand-painted title cards and a dynamic soundtrack drawn from the artist's LPs that, when combined, conjure up a ballad of sexual dependency like none other.


"Peter Goldman is the most exciting new filmmaker in recent years. Echoes of Silence, his first film, is a stunning piece of work." - Susan Sontag






Susan Sontag - Elizabeth Peyton








Susan Sontag - Henri Cartier-Bresson




In a consumer society, even the most well-intentioned and properly captioned work of photographers issues in the discovery of beauty. Susan Sontag








Susan Sontag - Duet for Cannibals - Lars Swanberg








Nan Goldin - The Ballad of sexual Dependency.