December 2025
Stop and smell the concrete flowers
Catherine Corman’s Lonely City by Janina Picard
Before movement, something stirs. A pulse beneath perception, traveling through unseen roots, threading its way through matter and memory, the unconscious mind. Catherine Corman’s Lonely City rises from that subterranean field. A field of solitude.
Catherine Corman, Lonely City, Teaser, 2025
Walking Toward Oneself
We follow Greta Garbo on a walk through New York City; a walk that is more meditation than means of travel. More discovery than direction. It becomes an exploration of how solitude takes shape inside the mind and the modern metropolis simultaneously. We witness the protagonist as a projection of the inner voice seeking real human connection in a city overflowing with people. Lonely City feels like a mental screenshot of Garbo’s mind in the 50s mirroring the shared human experience of isolation in our current hyperdigitalised times.
The short film unfolds like an image lifted gently from the unconscious. Its flickering Super 8 grain recalls the texture of recollection itself: fragile, luminous, dissolving as it forms.
In C.G. Jung’s language, that is the voice of the true artist, one who has yielded to the unconscious and lets its symbolism speak for itself.
Corman takes the viewer on an inner journey that presents itself as a state of hypersensitive consciousness, not needing to be fabricated, only needing to be recorded; not unlike Eugène Atget’s Pendant l’eclipse (1912) which Corman cites as visual inspiration for her work and portrays a crowd gathered to observe an eclipse, first published in the journal La Révolution surréaliste in 1926.
Catherine Corman, Lonely City, Film still, 2025
Art as Threshold
Lonely City examines how desire and alienation intertwine, and how art can both express and alleviate the ache of feeling apart.
Jung saw the artist as a threshold through which the unseen crosses into visibility. Corman’s work serves as that threshold: listening to the imagery revealing itself, to the heartbeat of Manhattan’s concrete ground, capturing moments of public solitude. Greta Garbo walks and witnesses, solitary like every other stranger of New York City.
Lonely City explores what happens when porousness of receptivity opens the door to sacred urban solitude and we return to a state of childlike wonder experiencing the world as if looking at images from our dream laid out before us like the valleys of a city.
What begins as Garbo’s personal journey from downtown Manhattan toward the skyscrapers of midtown expands into a larger investigation of what it means to be lonely in a world that appears perpetually connected.
Ultimately, Lonely City reveals that loneliness is not just a private emotion but a collective cultural condition and that within its depths, unexpected solidarities and forms of beauty can emerge.
“...slowly absorbing that loneliness, longing, means simply that one is alive.”
Catherine Corman, Lonely City, Film still, 2025
Catherine Corman's short film Lost Horizon, based on the work of Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, was invited to the Cannes Film Festival, and long-listed for the Academy Award for Best Short Film. Her short film Les Non-Dupes screened at the Berlin Biennale. Her book of photographs Daylight Noir was exhibited at the Venice Biennale and is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Library. Her photographs have been honored at Paris Photo and The Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
She is the daughter of film director Roger Corman, and appears in his film Frankenstein Unbound, playing the role of Justine.
Janina Picard is a professional film actor, director, writer, and producer. She works internationally for film and TV, as well as multilingual theater productions. An MFA graduate from the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, Germany, LAMDA, and The Actors Studio, New York City, Janina has trained with Kristin Linklater, Sandra Seacat and Ellen Burstyn among others.
Speaking German, English, French, and Italian, Janina works globally across markets and cultures and is frequently hired for her emotional versatility and her on-camera fight skills (Taekwondo black belt).