Maysles Documentary Center premiered a new series this summer that was literally on the streets of Harlem. 

Art Jones, a filmmaker, educator and video jockey, had been putting up screens around the city that screened his documentation and interviews that engaged with the summer protests. Art offered to rig a makeshift screen out of a shower curtain in Maysles’ large window storefront on which his work could be projected, and invited the community to gather round for a socially-distant and masked viewing one Friday evening in July. 

This turned into a weekly event that became known as the Sidewalk Cinema. The free outdoor event provided the essential big screen experience at a time when safe community events were far and few between. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Maysles Documentary Center sat largely empty for most of the week, but on Friday nights ten socially distanced seats faced the storefront and Maysles once again became a location to watch documentaries in Harlem.

Sidewalk screenings captured, in the words of Emily Apter, a Cinema Programmer and Development Associate at Maysles, “the come-and-go community spirit of the sidewalk.” She describes, “One woman was coming to pretty much every screening– a true sidewalk cinema regular. And before My People Are Rising, she came up to me and asked how long the movie was. I said about an hour, and she said something like ‘Okay good, I gotta put turkey in the oven and I was hoping I could make it to the screening and back in time.’ And she did!”

Emily describes, “The Sidewalk Cinema was born out of a series of conversations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the temporary closure of the indoor cinema...While we’ve found some amazing silver linings to digital programming and Zoom conversations, we didn’t want it to detract from our commitment to the local audience. We wanted to make sure that folks used to dropping by the cinema or who may not have reliable internet access could still take part in everything going on. Maybe there was a way to preserve the essence of collective movie-going while still prioritizing everyone’s safety.”

And the Sidewalk Cinema was thriving, providing a place for creators as well as audience members to turn for their film itch. The Little David Show– a short web series produced during the pandemic by Harlem filmmakers, had its watch party premiere around this shared screen.

David, creator and titular star of The Little David Show adds, “I’ve been in Harlem my whole life… I’ve watched the neighborhood go from nothing to something, you know what I’m saying. When I was about 19, they built Maysles and I remember… I couldn’t go all the time but I went when I could and I just knew that at some point I would have something playing at Maysles. And it happened.”

Other films featured on the sidewalk ranged from experimental classics such as Water & Power and The Last Angel of History to one screening in the 12th annual Black Panther Film Festival.

The Maysles Documentary Center has always sat between 127th and 128th at Malcolm X Boulevard, and through the Sidewalk Cinema, the films were visible from down the block; the music from the neighboring bars and might mix in with the soundtracks and the passerby becomes an audience member for maybe just a moment. 

This summer the cinema found its way outdoors, becoming a harmonizing melody in the music of Harlem. The series has gone quiet for the season but we look forward to seeing community cinema come back in familiar ways when the time is right.