Behind The Scenes Of An Immersive, Cinematic Love Letter To Real And Imagined New York

In May, “This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” opened at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibition is a survey of the multifarious depictions of the city in film and television, song and poetry, literature, visual and performing arts, and fashion.

One of the highlights is “You Are Here,” a 21-minute “immersive film experience.” Visitors are surrounded on three sides by 16 large-scale screens comprising excerpts from more than 400 films made in the last 100 years, selected by a committee of filmmakers and experts.

It’s kind of a New York City cinema supercut, with glimpses of everything from “West Side Story” to “Wall Street” to “The Warriors.”

Forbes spoke with RadicalMedia’s Chairman and CEO Jon Kamen and Sarah M. Henry, Chief Curator and Interim Director at the Museum of the City of New York, about the installation.

Tell us about the process of putting “You Are Here” together. How do you even begin with a project like this? How many epic movie nights are involved?

Sarah: Fortunately, we had an all-star curatorial committee of film experts, scholars, and programmers to guide us. We started with visioning sessions to establish the goals and guiding principles, and then they did a massive, evolving brain dump of movie and scene nominations into an epic spreadsheet. From there, the producers, writers, and editor at RadicalMedia ingested hundreds of hours of film, looking for the perfect scenes, fitting them together into a 16-dimensional story.

Jon: The initial concept was to create an immersive visual spectacle, surrounding the viewer with film scenes and motifs both expected and unexpected. The iconic New York taxicabs, romance across the city, the subway, comedy, finance, neighborhoods, food, etc. We knew that we wanted to have a lot of movement – creating moments of montage, with clips juxtaposed side-by-side, interspersed with full room takeovers using repetition and cascading visuals. The films were to be in conversation with each other – complementing, opposing, referencing, and echoing each other.

How that would actually cohere in practice to create a story-led experience was something that took us a few months to create a tangible vision for.

MCNY appointed a panel of film experts who nominated about 550 films for consideration. We started watching film after film, and in that process, we found similar NYC-specific themes started to emerge: apartment living, subway shenanigans, monster apocalypse, creativity, kissing on the streets, street fashion, Wall Street greed, loneliness, ambition, dancing on the streets, and so on.

We considered these themes to be our “puzzle pieces.” Individual scenes from individual movies (no matter how important they might be in cinema history) weren’t relevant unless they were thematically related to other scenes from other movies.

For example, the apartment scene in “Rosemary’s Baby” perfectly aligns with the apartment scene in “She’s Gotta Have It.” So, even though there are stylistic and content differences between these moments in the films, we’re able to create a “conversation” between them through that thematic lens. This is triangulated across 16 screens at once, so it’s quite a complex “meta” experience of New York, and of New York on film.

We knew we wanted the immersion to be an emotional ride, full of the ups and downs that reflect life in NYC. The themes are organized very loosely on the classic “Hero’s Journey” story arc. Starting with the “normalcy” of the glamorous entertainment culture of New York, we slowly chisel away at this pop-culture image of our city. We bring the visitor into the “hum-drum” of NYC life: the onslaught of taxis/traffic, crowded streets crammed to the hilt, the difficulty of subways, etc. We cycle through highs and lows, from cultural heights (including a cinematic tour of all five boroughs) to city devastation (through monster movies like Ghostbusters, but also with documentary imagery of 9/11, Sandy, and The Bronx in the 70s).

Once we had this thematic story arc roughed out, we had the onerous task of creating logical “connective threads” from theme to theme. Without the luxury of voice-over or interviews to make those logic leaps, as is often the case in documentaries, we featured quotes from the films themselves.

For example, when we move from the subway theme to the apartment theme, we needed a movie quote that physically takes place on the subway that alludes to living in an apartment. This is something that is absolutely not to be found on Google, I promise you. We watched hundreds of movies and subway scenes over many months. Most were dead ends. But in that case, we finally found a line from “Frances Ha,” in which Greta Gerwig is riding the subway, talking about how she can’t afford to live in Tribeca. We knew we could make that logic leap work from the subway theme to the apartment theme with that line.

Those lines feel totally organic in the immersion, even though they’re largely decontextualized from the original film. To me, it was a real coup that we could pull that off to the degree that we did.

This took a large amount of experimentation to get the immersion to work – let alone be compelling. It took another number of months to put together the 21-minute experience.

Seeing the audience’s reaction on the opening nights made it all worthwhile. The delight, the nostalgia, the frustration… heck, even the tears that were cried by lifelong New Yorkers… that’s when you know you’ve created something truly special.

Are there any New York landmarks or sites that stand out again and again in 100 years of New York on film?

Jon: Probably the most common landmark to appear is the Statue of Liberty. It figures as a symbol of hope, as well as a tourist destination. It also appears beheaded in apocalypse films, displaying the devastation of the city. Interpretation is for the visitor to make, but it’s a landmark we explicitly included to think about the notion of freedom, and how that changes from theme to theme, movie to movie – and what that actually means to New York and those that live here.

We also felt very strongly about giving prominence to the street life of New York and treating the “everyday New York experience” with as much veneration as the more traditional iconic landmarks. Because of this, we very explicitly have sections from films that capture life in all five boroughs. And visitors have loved those sections in the experience. They are unexpected.

What themes seemed to emerge in 100 years of New York on film — and in the installation? Are there any surprises or juxtapositions you particularly enjoy?

Sarah: The project is centered on the inherent contradictions and contrasts in the city, showcasing New York City as what our curatorial committee member Jessica Green calls “a cocktail of cosmopolitanism” – a place where “high,” “middle brow,” and “low culture” experiences and economies are in perpetual conversation and conflict. Themes of energy, joy, rebirth, and the fight for justice commingle with images of menace, corruption, and nihilism that have always driven the fascination with New York.

It’s delightful to me to see how certain tropes – the crush of the subway, the struggle to catch a cab, the energy of the stage, the joy of grabbing street food, and the collective power of New York communities – have been touched upon, revisited, and remixed repeatedly over the course of an entire century.

Jon: In a “post-apocalyptic” section we feature movies with NYC totally abandoned and empty – an experience many of us felt with Covid and other disastrous moments; “I Am Legend,” “Vanilla Sky,” “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil,” and others fill this theme out visually alongside documentary materials of 9/11, Sandy, and the Bronx in the 70s. This mixture of fiction and non-fiction seemed very rich to us and is felt in the room while viewing.

But it was also incredibly important to show how post-apocalyptic nothingness can be transformed into a well of creative inspiration because this seems really New York to us. And we wanted visitors to experience the motif of creating something out of nothing and see how that was articulated specifically on the streets of New York in both documentaries and feature films.

There’s even an easter egg for the Museum of the City of New York – we feature a moment from “On the Town” where the three sailors actually visit the Museum. That’s fun, and pretty meta.

What can you learn about New York from sampling around 400 New York films?

Jon: While this exhibit experience is intended to be communal, it’s also very personal and – as with all film screenings – we expect everyone to walk away with their own interpretation and emotional connection to the material.

That said, these films really demonstrate New York’s resilience. There is no better place in the world for reinvention and transformation than NYC. It’s part of our city’s DNA, and that is why all these filmmakers chose NYC as their canvas.

Sarah: The entire project plays with the relationship between the “real” city and the stories — and sometimes cliches — of New York. Together, the blend of studio, independent, experimental, and documentary films articulate a vision of the city as a place where the hustle, attitude, and drive to “make it” have been both shared and deeply contested. They also remind us of how powerfully New York City has influenced the global imagination – whether it’s about glamor or greed, struggle or triumph. And more than anything, they showcase the mind-bending variety of experiences and people who have made the city what it is.