The Met just posted Hilary Harris's Organism (1975) to YouTube

It took documentary filmmaker Hilary Harris (1929 – 1999) 15 years to make his short time-lapse film depicting Manhattan as a living creature. Called Organism, it was completed in 1975 and is considered to be a forerunner to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982). It's also fun to see New York in its grimy heyday.

The film is in constant motion, achieving an effect of organic growth and change through the use of time lapse photography. The city becomes a flowing phenomenon of energy, vitality, and eternal renewal. It is a giant organism pulsating with life, an organism that feeds on the life's blood of those who come to it, seeking to conquer the city.

One of the most memorable and powerful parts of Organism is the synthesizer soundtrack, which was composed by David Hollister. It's truly out of this world. Hollister also composed the music for a 1976 softcore pornographic film, Let My Puppets Come. "All the sex scenes in the film are between puppets or puppets on humans." [Wikipedia] His IMDB resume is very short. I wonder what became of him?

From The Met:

As part of The Met's 150th anniversary, each month in 2020 we released three to four films from the Museum's extensive moving-image archive. The series will continue on a monthly basis through March 2022.

Using time-lapse footage of New York City, the filmmaker Hilary Harris imagines the city as an organism. Traffic arteries are seen as the bloodstream circulating through the urban body; skyscrapers are the skeletal structure. Shops, railroads, bridges, beaches, and parades are juxtaposed with cellular activity shown under the microscope, illustrating the greater choreography of city life in all its fascinating complexity.