"Bridge" Peers Into the Soul of New York's Finest Crossings with Contact Microphones and Super 8

I don’t live in New York City, but I love its bridges. I love the combination of babies in strollers on the pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge with brutal engineering and subway trains. I like that on the bridges you’re touching a big empty empty space right in the middle of the notion of empty space’s exact urban opposite. And there’s maybe a cool breeze and everything sounds a bit different. The bridges are in a real way their own urban ecosystems. Kevin T. Allen’s 8 mm short “Bridge” gets that better than most anything, a rare view into three Brooklyn/Manhattan bridges via film and contact microphones.

In his words:

A study of three similar but distinct microcultures: the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge. Their soundscapes interrogated through the use of contact microphones, allowing us to listen to the physical infrastructure of the bridges and reveal their inherent macroacoustics. The film aims to treat the bridge as an anthropological body for discourse, as a physiology of limbs, organs, eyes and ears moving in time.

The film happens to look pretty nice too.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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