Censored Public Spaces: NYC Weights and Measures

“But on another level, it was simply a matter of controlling public behavior
and free expression.”

Jem Cohen, Screenshot from NYC Weights and Measures, 2006. 16mm on DVD, 06:15 m. Courtesy of the artist Jem Cohen photographed by M. Ackerman. Black and white photograph.

Censored Public Spaces: NYC Weights and Measures
Jem Cohen

I gather images and sounds. Sometimes, I go out with a camera and recorder simply to document, without any pre-ordained agenda. This isn’t the only way I work – right now I’m finishing a narrative feature – but even there it’s a hybrid which makes use of traditions of street shooting that go way back, a documentary tradition based primarily on direct observation. My influences include: Helen Levitt, Leon Levinstein, Robert Frank, and going further back, Jean Vigo, August Sander, Atget.

In the case of “NYC Weights and Measures”, I’d been asked by PBS to contribute a short in celebration of the 10th year of Reel New York, a program showing independent films about the city. I began to excavate from my archive as well as to wander with my 16mm Bolex, and then to connect footage: the ticker-tape parade for a returning astronaut, winter dusk from a lower Manhattan rooftop, views from the elevated train, a nodding sleeper seen from my own Brooklyn window, an expiring building on 42nd street. The film was a series of impressions; it wasn’t really “about” anything, or more accurately, it was just about the way that things speak to each other in the city, and how disparate elements coalesce, like iron filings around a magnetic field. Because I knew it would be shown on T.V., which on the whole is increasingly restrictive, formulaic and hyperactive, I wanted it to be ambiguous and contemplative, but aside from that I had no particular scheme and certainly no political intentions. (I have another short, “Little Flags”, shot in some of the same exact locations at the Gulf War “victory” parade, which was far more political in its intention. It’s showing now in PS1’s 9/11 show). Circumstances, and a different way of thinking about the film, led me to change my mind about “NYC Weights and Measures …”

In 2005, I was on a train from New York to D.C., occasionally shooting from the window. I’d shot from train windows for twenty years, many times on the same route. This time I was told to stop, and then the train was held in Philadelphia while uniformed police boarded and demanded my film. When I arrived In D.C., I was met by other authorities. My film was eventually given to the Anti-Terrorism Task Force and from them, to the FBI. With the help of a New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer I did eventually get them to declare that it had been “cleared” and would be sent back. Months later, they returned the empty can without the film. I never did get the footage. Meanwhile in New York, there had been separate attempts to ban photography and filmmaking in the subways, and then to restrict it on the streets as a whole. On one level, as was the case with my incident, this stemmed from concerns about terrorists documenting “infrastructure” for nefarious reasons. But on another level, it was simply a matter of controlling public behavior and free expression. I would eventually devote a great deal of time to fighting these regulations.

So, what was once going to be a purely lyrical film also became a film about these issues – about the fact that documenting the landscape itself may be an inherently political act, and that artists don’t always get to decide what, in every sense, becomes of their work.

*** Jem Cohen: NYC Weights and Measures is on view at The Jewish Museum from November 04, 2011 – March 25, 2012.

*** This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC.