While ill and experiencing some difficulty in completing the editing of this film, Brakhage was reading the Marguerite Young novel, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
Berlin in the early 1930s. Bello is an unemployed young man who loves the underage Frieda. In order to earn a living for both of them, Frieda goes on the streets.
Coast Zone […] explores the use of deep-focus, contrasting background figures (often in motion) with those in the foreground (sometimes in extreme close-up).
A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.