A large part of Cohen’s work, and several of the films for which he is best known, could be loosely described as city portraits; impressions of the spaces and places that he has passed through and, in particular, his native New York. Cohen’s acclaimed film Lost Book Found (1996), which is one of his few works to have been screened in Australia, (1) was shot over a number of years on the streets of pre-Giuliani New York. Inspired by a period of time when Cohen worked as a push-cart vendor on the streets of New York, it meditates on a changing cityscape dictated by the demands of the dollar. The semi-fictional narrative reflects Cohen’s sentiment that after working on the street for some time he became invisible to passing people and, the film’s narration continues, ‘as I became invisible, I began to see things that had once been invisible to me’.

Just Hold Still: A Conversation with Jem Cohen
by Rhys Graham