The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects, and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city: a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artifacts—the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives. The project stems from the filmmaker's first job in New York—working as a pushcart vendor on Canal Street. As usual, Cohen shot in hundreds of locations using unobtrusive equipment and generally without any crew. Influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin.
Cinematography
Grainy Super-8 NYC that breathes like a living organism.
Direction
Cohen's invisible presence—pure observation, zero intrusion.
Writing
The notebook's cryptic lists as accidental found poetry.
Director
Jem Cohen
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Cohen shot this while actually working as a Canal Street vendor, making it one of cinema's great acts of workplace theft.
The film's structure mirrors Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project—unfinished, fragmentary, obsessed with the ephemera of commerce.
US
