Directors: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand
Year: 1921
Runtime: 10 min
Source: Youtube
The ten-minute art piece Manhatta, conceived by two photographers Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand is occasionally called cinema's first avant-garde film, and is somehow both more conventional, and more extreme, than that description denotes.
To start with, Manhatta is not about rejecting the status quo, but celebrating it, in this case the apotheosis of the industrial era that was Manhattan after the turn of the century. We see stunning shots of a city-scape that is both familiar and strange, unmistakably New York despite missing most of the landmarks we would recognize (with the exception of the Brooklyn Bridge, which has never looked so stunning outside Woody Allen's own ode to the city). These shots are paired with words from Walt Whitman's poem about the city - the passages chosen here center around man's mastering of the environment, and implicitly, his own destiny.
On the other hand, a modern viewing can't help but see this version of the city as an anachronistic dystopia. I'm not sure there's any scene from Metropolis or Modern Times that quite rivals the image of an approaching Staten Island Ferry packed to the gills with identically-clad businessmen, who pour out of the boat in a rush that is just less than frantic. Or the shot of men in black and white suits walking in a graveyard with black and white tombstones. Or a harbor filled with giant steam cruisers, seen from the tops of skyscrapers themselves belching out steam. It's impossible for a man of my time to look on this all and not see a society on the edge of a cliff.
Year: 1921
Runtime: 10 min
Source: Youtube
The ten-minute art piece Manhatta, conceived by two photographers Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand is occasionally called cinema's first avant-garde film, and is somehow both more conventional, and more extreme, than that description denotes.
To start with, Manhatta is not about rejecting the status quo, but celebrating it, in this case the apotheosis of the industrial era that was Manhattan after the turn of the century. We see stunning shots of a city-scape that is both familiar and strange, unmistakably New York despite missing most of the landmarks we would recognize (with the exception of the Brooklyn Bridge, which has never looked so stunning outside Woody Allen's own ode to the city). These shots are paired with words from Walt Whitman's poem about the city - the passages chosen here center around man's mastering of the environment, and implicitly, his own destiny.
On the other hand, a modern viewing can't help but see this version of the city as an anachronistic dystopia. I'm not sure there's any scene from Metropolis or Modern Times that quite rivals the image of an approaching Staten Island Ferry packed to the gills with identically-clad businessmen, who pour out of the boat in a rush that is just less than frantic. Or the shot of men in black and white suits walking in a graveyard with black and white tombstones. Or a harbor filled with giant steam cruisers, seen from the tops of skyscrapers themselves belching out steam. It's impossible for a man of my time to look on this all and not see a society on the edge of a cliff.
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