PARADOX ON 72ND STREET (1982)
Directed by Gene Searchinger
58 minutes
Over the course of three years, Gene Searchinger filmed pedestrians, joggers, buskers, bench sitters, stoop sleepers, and countless other types of New Yorker (whom the narration describes as "exaggerated Americans") at the corner of Broadway and 72nd St. Visually, the film presents an hour-long stream of individuals, each with their own unfathomable inner mindscape, who together comprise "the collective"; the paradox referred to in the title is narrator Lewis Thomas's assertion that, "It is in our genes to live together and to depend on each other, to be our individual separate selves and at the same time the working parts of others." Thomas, a biologist and the film's co-writer, shares narrating duties with the anthropologist Philip Slater, both of whom offer meandering philosophical notes on individualism in American society.