Film Series Covers a Century of the Lower East Side "THIS would be the perfect space to show movies on a summer night," Sean Ferguson said, while standing on a rooftop that once served as the open-air reading room of the Seward Park Library, a majestic four-story Renaissance Revival building on East Broadway and Jefferson Street. He pointed toward streets of glowing brick face stretching to the Manhattan Bridge and East River. I see this shot in the films I show all the time. Mr. Ferguson, a librarian at the branch, is the creator of the LES Heritage Film Series, monthly screenings of 16-millimeter films - features, shorts, experimental works and documentaries - all shot in and around the Lower East Side from 1915 to 2011. The community's tenements, buildings, bars and other quintessential locales supply a lively, and continuous, set for nearly a century's worth of changing streetscapes and characters, including scores of locals employed as extras. In these moving images, pushcarts yield to punk rockers, who themselves become obscured in the smoke of the twin towers. A classically trained musician with a master's degree in composition, Mr. Ferguson, 41, has spent the past eight years in and around the neighborhood. When not running the reference desk at the library, he plays electric guitar and sings with his band rpllnt (pronounced "repellent") and scores independent films. A Los Angeles native, he moved to Alphabet City in 2004 and began working for the New York Public Library, first as a music specialist at the Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and then, when his job was eliminated because of budget cuts, as a branch librarian at Seward Park. "Coming from not-so-old Los Angeles, I loved walking around a neighborhood that's incredibly layered," he said. So many immigrant groups have passed through here, and there are ghosts of them everywhere, in the streets and at the library. Mr. Ferguson, who resembles Johnny Depp and has longish black hair and a taste for inky garb, has drawn on his own background in film and the arts to bring those ghosts to life in the film series, making his reputation as an innovative arts programmer. Downtowners - pensioners and hipsters alike - have taken to it with enthusiasm, packing a room that can barely hold 75 people, in one of the rare instances when the neighborhood's different generations come together. Traven Rice, co-founder and arts editor of the popular Lower East Side news Web site the Lo-Down, has championed the series on her blog. "It's a totally authentic experience of the neighborhood in rarely seen film footage," Ms. Rice said. She described the film's screening room, a basement space in the Seward Park Library, as "schoolroom chic or someplace where you'd plot a communist takeover." The silent films in the series have proven particularly popular because Mr. Ferguson creates original soundtracks for them. For May's offering, "Regeneration" - the story of an orphan turned mobster, directed by Raoul Walsh, creator of the Humphrey Bogart classic "High Sierra" - he spliced together his original chamber music with works by Erik Satie and Scott Joplin composed in 1915, the year of the film's release. The soundtrack, a 12-hour undertaking for a 56-minute film, reflected the mood and action of the story so organically it seemed to have been created contemporaneously, though to play it he simply cued up his iPod. "As a composer, Sean cares about stories, and he's got a feel for them," said John Douglas Sinclair, the writer and director of "Heathens and Thieves," a Western for which Mr. Ferguson wrote the score. What makes him unique is that he weaves different influences, from rock to Baroque counterpoint, to create a musical world. The film won the jury prize in April at the 45th WorldFest International Independent Film Festival, held in Houston. Mr. Ferguson culls movies for the LES Heritage Film Series from more than 6,000 titles of rare 16-millimeter films that form the core of the Reserve Film and Video collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in Lincoln Center Plaza. The collection focuses on independently produced works, including animations, experimental films and documentaries, and anyone with a New York Public Library card can reserve and check out 16-millimeter films, many of which are rare artworks. "Sean has mined the collection for films that really speak of the area - historically and aesthetically - and bring together the Seward Park community," David Callahan, the principal librarian of the Reserve Film and Video collection, said in an e-mail. He's selected a range of films made over decades that reflect the film collection's composition - documentaries, feature films and experimental works. Mr. Callahan has been instrumental to the growth and success of the LES Heritage Film Series since its inception in 2009, as has Elena Rossi-Snook, a preservationist and moving-image archivist for the reserve film and video collection. She functions as a cinema detective, tracking down rare films, like "Punking Out," a 1978 documentary about CBGB, directed by the independent filmmakers Maggi Carson, Juliusz Kossakowski and Frederic A. Shore. Mr. Callahan and Ms. Rossi-Snook began working with Mr. Ferguson when he was putting together materials for Seward Park Library's centennial celebration in 2009. Perusing the film catalog, Mr. Ferguson discovered what was essentially three decades of neighborhood home movies filmed by the librarians who worked at Seward Park between the 1930s and "70s, all consolidated on a single reel titled "The Seward Park Branch and the Neighborhood It Serves." It contained rare and historically significant footage, shot in black and white and, for the 1970s section, Kodachrome. "I called David and asked him about the film, and he actually found an original script that goes along with it and sent it to me," Mr. Ferguson said. He rewrote the script and narrated the film in his rich singer's baritone at several screenings he held during the centennial festivities. The film was a hit both with community members and other local organizations, including the Henry Street Settlement and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which incorporated some of it into the orientation film shown to visitors before they begin their tour. "We were mobbed on all sides with people wanting stills from the movie - and requests to keep rescreening it," Mr. Ferguson recalled. There was a hunger in the community for these types of archival images - but the Seward Park Film unleashed it. A series was born. The Seward Park Film bookends the series each season - which runs from October through June - as the first and last film. It will be shown again on June 6. Back from the roof tour, Mr. Ferguson was greeted by a favorite patron and film series devotee, Gertrude Schwartz, a retired saleswoman from the former Gimbel's department store, who is in her 80s and lives in the Seward Park Co-ops, just behind the library. "Sean always takes good care of me," she said, checking out a stack of books he had ordered for her. Standing nearby, Mr. Ferguson's colleague Johanna Lewis noted wryly, "The old ladies love him."