The Video Origin of Rubble Without Applause

By 1997, my interest in these enigmatic stone faces had grown to the point that I had decided to spend two months videotaping any I could find on the Upper East Side of New York City. Made before I began a career as a film and video editor, the intention was to make a short program that could be shared with friends and family. The equipment used was a consumer grade video camera and two borrowed S-VHS decks, which allowed me to assemble a very crude montage of clips selected from over 30 hours of footage. The medieval analog editing system consisted of finding a shot mostly free of video dropouts, hitting play on one deck, record on the other, then pausing it after a few seconds to frantically search for the next logged shot to add before the five minute pause limit disengaged the recording heads and sabotaged the intended edit.

As you can see, the footage was already worn and plagued with frequent dropouts by that time. The source tapes proved to be more ephemeral than the sculptures I was documenting.

Originally I used a jazz soundtrack consisting of Art Tatum's "My Ideal" as the backdrop when showing it to family and friends, but years later I decided to replace it with a variety of New York City street sounds, and pieces of two recordings by guitarist Warren Cuccurullo entitled "Deep Sleep" and "Crystal Clear." This video was the beginning of what was initially called the "Forgotten Faces" project, which later became the website "New York City Faces," before finally settling on "Rubble Without Applause" in 2015.

The Stone Faces of New York City's Upper East Side in 1997 - Video by Alan Bazin