
Following his use of art, painting and sculpture, in his work of the previous decades, Hurwitz took on a project for the American Foundation of the Arts aimed at deepening and enriching, for art students, the way in which we see. Working with his second wife, the editor Peggy Lawson, he made four short films comprising The Art of Seeing Series. The films, made without words, are beautiful poems to the pleasure of sight. This film came as a challenge that Hurwitz made for himself, to replicate in film his experience of seeing a work of art — in this case Césanne’s Still Life with Apples, 1895-98, that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although he finished the visual part of the film, he was stymied by the soundtrack in which he wanted no narration. About 45 years later, his colleague, Manfred Kirchheimer, created a sound track and produced the finished film.

Heart of a Dog
2015

Naqoyqatsi
2002

The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button
2009

Halloween: 25 Years of Terror
2006

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
2013

Powaqqatsi
1988

The Class of ‘92
2013

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
2000

Birth of the Living Dead
2013

Directed by John Ford
1971