Sam Fleischner’s Jetty

Sandy struck during what was supposed to have been the last week of shooting, and Fleischner incorporated the disaster into his story. “What makes Stand Clear of the Closing Doors an exceptional film,” wrote Amy Taubin in her review of this “richly textured, fully engaging” feature, is “what movie contracts term an ‘act of God.’” A few years earlier, Taubin had praised Wah Do Dem (2009), “the brilliant debut feature which Fleischner codirected with Ben Chace” and another story of a lost soul, this one adrift in Jamaica.

Reconstruction of Rockaway Beach began a little less than a year after Sandy drifted inland and dissipated. In 2018, Fleischner, Courtney Muller, and Greg Stewart cofounded the Rockaway Film Festival, constructing venues and screening movies practically year-round. A few years later, Fleischner became fascinated by “the dramatic installation of various infrastructure projects. I also watched people watching the machines at work—fully immersed—like the best kind of show or cinema itself. When the multi-year jetty project was announced, I wished that someone would make a film about the process, and pretty soon realized that if I wanted to see this film, I’d have to be the one to make it.”

That film is Jetty (2024), an utterly absorbing fifty-three-minute meditation screening at Anthology Film Archives from May 14 through 20. Fleischner will be on hand for Q&As moderated by Gina Telaroli (May 15), Taubin (May 16), John Wilson (May 18), and Jason Evans (May 20).

Martin Scorsese once called Vittorio De Seta “an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet,” and it’s not a stretch to apply that description here. Like De Seta’s portraits of rural Italian milieus in the 1950s, Jetty eschews narration—but not snippets from remarks by passersby or the voice of what a viewer might assume to be an engineer who explains that the jetties being constructed along the beach should help safeguard the diverse community from the next major storm.

A pair of women of a certain age share a laugh as they recall the days when Rockaway Beach was referred to as the “Irish Riviera.” A guy on a bike remembers when the place was a literal dump. Another woman describes a trancelike state she enters when giving her body over to the rolling waves, an experience not unlike watching Jetty.

Also like De Seta’s short films, Jetty is enriched by vivid color and grain; cinematographer Oliver Lanzenberg shot Jetty on Super 16 mm. Granite boulders the size of cars are blasted from a quarry and lifted by machines that lumber like elephants but claw away at the earth like giant insects. Tons of wet sand extracted from the sea are blasted in fanning waves along the coastline. Bathers gather to sizzle under the sun.

Besides De Seta’s, other filmmakers’ work may come to mind. Like Brett Story’s The Hottest August (2019), Jetty reveals a side of New York few outside the city are even aware of. And like D. A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1953), Jetty, with its original score by Animal Collective, offers an ideal melding of imagery and sound. When Eric Allen Hatch programmed Jetty for last year’s New Next Film Fest, he called it “a sensory-rich record of human efforts to subdue earthly elements, at least temporarily; human engineering and mechanical tools pushing back against the inexorable tide, one breakwater at a time.”