Born in New York in 1939. Goldman did not have a strong interest in film but did see early works from the French New Wave. He enrolled in university, first in New York and then at La Sorbonne in Paris, but did not complete his studies. Returning to New York, he was given an old 8mm camera from his father, and he began shooting street scenes in Greenwich Village.
An important, yet mostly unknown, filmmaker of American cinema. Echoes of Silence (a movie with no dialogue) was shot in 1964 on a small budget in Greenwich Village, following three wandering young men. Banned in France and Italy, it nevertheless won the special prize at Pesaro Film Festival in 1966, awarded by a jury including Godard, Bellochio and Bertolucci. Whilst his next film Wheel of Ashes revisited themes similar to those of its predecessor, Saint-Germain des Pres replacing the New York neighbourhood, dialogue enters into the silence, and our hero pursues a quest for love. Peter Emmanuel Goldman's rarely screened debut, an underappreciated landmark of the New American Cinema, chronicles the lives of twenty-somethings adrift in New York City, finding tremendous pathos in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, girls putting on makeup, a stroll beneath the pulsing lights of Times Square marquees. Composed with a lo-fi purity and bereft of diegetic sound, its shadowy images of youthful flaneurs are paired with evocatively hand-painted title cards and a dynamic soundtrack drawn from the artist's LPs that, when combined, conjure up a ballad of sexual dependency like none other.
His first feature-length film Echoes of Silence took the sorts of everyday scenes he had been shooting and created a fictional story in which to place them, following the adventures of an aimless young man wandering the streets of New York. He cast his friend, sculptor Miguel Chacour, in the lead role. The silent film was shot over two years on a budget of $1600. Miguel, the hero of the movie, was initially working as an electrician for the film. The montage was made at night; the music was taken from among the records scattered across the flat: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Prokofiev's suite Semyon Kotko, Charles Mingus' Haitian Fight Song. Susan Sontag saw the film in early 1965 and was enthusiastic about it.
Wheel of Ashes was his third feature film. He shot the movie in Paris between 1967–1968 thanks to a grant he received through Jean-Luc Godard. The film, shot in seven weeks with Pierre Clémenti in the main role, reflects a mystic crisis. Pierre Clémenti, who, just as so many French people at that time, did not speak English, and understood the title in a totally different way: 'We Love Hashish'.
Peter Emanuel Goldman had been married to Birgit Nielsen since 1968. Following the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, Goldman became a committed Zionist. He wanted his wife to convert to Judaism but she did not, and the two ultimately divorced. Goldman served as head of Americans for a Safe Israel during the 1980s. He directed its 1983 documentary NBC in Lebanon: A Study in Media Misrepresentation, which alleged that NBC Nightly News' coverage of the 1982 Lebanon War was biased against Israel in favour of the Palestine Liberation Organization.