Man at work: filmmaker Jem Cohen (Photo: STV)

Jem Cohen was shooting in Brooklyn, under the Manhattan Bridge and its noisy ebb and flow of traffic and trains, when the squad car approached. It motored down York Street, slowed a bit, sharply turned left to head south on Pearl Street.

The officers inside glanced at Cohen, who offered a curt nod from behind his Bolex 16mm camera. The car straightened out, disappeared, and that was that.

Two hours later, leaving the site with his camera in one hand and a tripod in the other, Cohen's eyebrows rose. "It's amazing that we weren't stopped today," Cohen said. "I totally expected to be stopped."

It would not have been the first time Cohen, 42, incurred the admonitions of the New York Police Department. After 20 years of filming the city's ambient, evolving ballet of machinery, people and landscape, recent security clampdowns have made it substantially more difficult for Cohen to do the job that has made him one of the country's most respected independent filmmakers.

The most troubling event occurred in January, when authorities confiscated a roll of film that Cohen had shot from the window of an Amtrak train traveling from New York to Washington, D.C. That he avoided trouble while filming beneath the bridge seems like the exception that proves law enforcement's rule.

"Part of it is that it's just so random," Cohen told The Reeler. "You can't even know what the rules are. It doesn't make any sense. Like one day you can shoot whatever you want, and then the next day you're stopped for something. It just seems unimaginably ridiculous that you'd be stopped for shooting things like the skyline, or a wide shot of the U.N. building, or for taking the same angle on a bridge that countless tourists are taking every day."

Over the years, Cohen has assembled numerous short films and music projects from his mammoth archive of footage shot around the world. His 2004 feature Chain comprises scenes filmed during his travels on four continents, detailing the ways global commerce influences a sort of geographical assimilation.

His recent short, NYC Weights and Measures, concentrates the city's atmospheric bustle into a series of moving snapshots and scenescapes. His next feature--tentatively titled Late City Final--will expand the concept to Times Square, where Cohen has gathered two decades' worth of footage that he plans on editing to evince the area's dramatic change.

The majority of that film was archived well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—perhaps luckily for Cohen.

"The cops who stop me, they say, 'Don't you realize that post-9/11, you can't shoot infrastructure?'" he said. "I'm like, 'Infrastructure?' Everything's infrastructure. Every big building, every factory, every bridge, every tunnel. How are you going to shoot in New York and not film infrastructure? It's like telling you that you can shoot on the river, but don't get any water in your shot."

Cohen added that protecting infrastructure was the same concern leveled by the officers who claimed his film last winter. He said he had primarily been filming the Meadowlands—the sprawling, swampy New Jersey terrain just outside of New York.

The filmmaker subsequently enlisted the backing of both the American and New York Civil Liberties Unions, which had apparently succeeded in its appeals to have Cohen's film returned in early June. When Cohen went to pick up the reel, however, its box contained only a six-inch short end of 16mm film.

Since that time, Cohen said the civil liberties attorneys have jumped back on the case. And Cohen himself is considering the future of the street shooting that has helped define his art.

"A lot of other people have told me they've been stopped," Cohen said. "I haven't talked to anybody whose film had been confiscated. But I think these things are happening all the time and that people just aren't aware of it. There needs to be some type of clearing house for these stories."

The Reeler agrees and is interested in hearing any news you may know about filmmakers who have faced similar problems. Feel free to comment below, or e-mail the editor as we try and get to the bottom of this troubling phenomenon.