“I’m a sideshow person,” drawls the sword-swallowing proprietress of a decaying Times Square dime museum in Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter’s Hubert’s (1972), “and I never see any reason for there not to be a good sideshow going on.” The United States, pitifully hungover and downcast from the end of the ‘60s, was Ganz and Streeter’s circus, and there were sideshows everywhere for those with a camera through which to see them. The subject continues, informing the camera of her pal from Hubert’s Museum’s heyday: Sylvia, the Big-Footed Girl. Her feet were far too big to make shoes for, so she could only work until the winter since she didn’t want to walk barefoot through Manhattan in the snow.
The short documentaries of Ganz and Streeter, celebrated by Amos Vogel as “among the most controversial political films in America” in their time, appear to be one of the most bountiful re-discoveries of the present. Shepherded into restoration by Jake Perlin and The Film Desk over the last few years, the duo’s filmography is so overflowing with absurd little rhapsodies of American living that Anthology Film Archives, after a series in 2024, is returning for seconds.
Streeter and Ganz first met while attending Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Some of Ganz’s student films appear in tonight’s “New Discoveries” program, such as The New Deal (1968), and already show an eye well-attuned to finding surreal ironies amongst the mundane. Also attending Harvard was Claudia Weill, future director of 1978’s seminal Girlfriends. She co-directed Fran (1969), the lengthiest short in a program of bon mots, with Ganz. Streeter and Ganz emerged from Harvard and criss-crossed the country at exactly the perfect time: in New York, padded with state arts funding, a revolution led by young documentarians and video artists was taking place. The Videofreex took to the Catskills, the Experimental Television Center was established in Binghamton, and Portable Channel made guerrilla news broadcasts in the West. At the center of all of this was New York PBS affiliate WNET, which aired the satirical variety show The Great American Dream Machine, a consistent home for Streeter and Ganz’s vignettes.
“New Discoveries” is largely comprised of films made in New York City in 1972. In Claremont Stables, a diverse group of memorable New Yorkers fret about the closure of Central Park’s last remaining riding stable (“Never thought I’d see New York become a one-horse town!” one woman objects), interspersed with rather dreamlike slow-motion footage of horses being ridden through the park set to “Classical Gas.” Baskin Robbins is a brief, late night stop into a Midtown ice cream shop, where Ganz and Streeter cause chaos by simply asking the patrons’ favorite flavors (“I could do 10 minutes on Here Comes the Fudge,” a diner declares). Muzak, a visit to the offices of the titular company, manages to be both unnervingly sinister and extremely funny. Executives, Army scientists, and famed former Mets organist Jane Jarvis all appear, explaining robotically in close-up the virtues of controlling worker behavior through song.
Much as in the work of their Chicago brethren Tom Palazzolo and Jeff Kreines, in Ganz and Streeter’s New York, every passerby is a main character and something cosmic lies hidden behind every storefront.
“America – Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed of (And More): Tony Ganz + Rhody Streeter, Part 2” runs August 28-31 at Anthology Film Archives. Ganz and Streeter will be in attendance for Q&As tonight and tomorrow.
