NYPL Presents the City Symphony Program IN THE STREETS on April 17th, curated by Jon Gartenberg with Elena Rossi-Snook

STILL: CHARLES SHEELER AND PAUL STRAND’S MANHATTA (1921). SOURCE: MOMA.

On Thursday, April 17th, at 5:30pm, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will present the program In The Streets in the Bruno Walter Auditorium. Curated by GME President Jon Gartenberg with Elena Rossi-Snook, NYPL’s Reserve Film and Video Collection Specialist. this screening will explore the spirit and structure of the “city symphony” film.

Beginning in the 1970s, while working as a curator in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, Gartenberg conducted extensive research into New York City Symphony films, especially as represented in avant-garde, experimental, and independent movies. Throughout his career he has curated programs of city symphony films for numerous museums, festivals, and conferences internationally, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Ciné-Memoire (Paris), among others. In the Streets is Gartenberg’s latest curatorial project devoted to city symphonies.

Spanning the 1920s to the 1970s, the films in this program — ranging from Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s iconic city symphony film MANHATTA (1921) to YOUNG BRAVES (1970), an exuberant celebration of city life made by teenagers in a Lower East Side film workshop — offer a thrilling mix of rare and unique “deep cuts” from the Reserve Film and Video Collection’s 16mm holdings.

Click here to register for this event, and scroll to read Gartenberg’s program note:

New York City has always been a center of the motion picture industry. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, experimental and independent filmmakers have paid tribute to the dynamically changing landscape of New York City. They have employed diverse stylistic approaches to express both the formal beauty inherent in the city’s architecture and the rhythmic energy of its people. Photographed during both day and night, through distorting mirrors and prisms, as well as by more direct photographic methods, their films include scenes photographed from atop skyscrapers, under bridges, through parks, down Broadway, and in Coney Island. Such motion pictures have come to be identified as “city symphony” films.  In cinematic terms, such works represent the articulation of both a defined time frame (most often from morning until evening) as well as a carefully articulated geographic space (e.g., a loft apartment, a city block, the length of the island of Manhattan).  

During the 1920s, painters, photographers, and other artists in Europe and the United States, through the medium of film, furthered their ideas about the kinetic and plastic qualities of art. A genre of “city symphony” films emerged. Whether made in Paris (RIEN QUE LES HEURES, 1926, Alberto Cavalcanti), Berlin (BERLIN: DIE SINFONIE DER GROSSTADT, 1927, Walter Ruttmann), or New York (MANHATTA, 1921, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler), these films were structured around a day in the life of the metropolis from sunrise to sunset. Rhythmic editing patterns, privileged camera positions, extreme angles, and visual effects were all used to alter representation of the objective world. 

Photographer Paul Strand and painter/photographer Charles Sheeler collaborated on making MANHATTA, inspired by a poem of Walt Whitman’s. The design of their film extols the virtues of the skyscraper. Organizing their subject matter to emphasize the forms of objects, Strand and Sheeler shape the documentary images into reflections of formal patterns consistent with their work in the fine arts. In their movie, the artists transform images of skyscrapers and other man-made industrial creations into plays of light and shadow, and studies of geometry and linearity. For example, in the sequence showing building construction, shovels swing diagonally across the frame, beams rest flat against the horizon, and girders jut vertically into the air. The filmmakers distend real time by showing in multiple shots and points of view such activities as the construction of buildings and the vistas from rooftops.   

Renowned still photographer Helen Levitt, working with Janice Loeb and James Agee, made the short city symphony IN THE STREET (US, 1952). Shot on the streets of East Harlem, Levitt and her collaborators capture children in Halloween costumes, young lovers on building stoops, and an elderly woman ambling down the street; the film celebrates, in poetic fashion, the denizens of this local neighborhood.  The video introduction at the beginning of this curated program features 4 minutes of the opening pre-credit sequence in episode 7 of Ric Burns’ epic NEW YORK: A DOCUMENTARY FILM (1999). This sequence elevates the historical significance of IN THE STREET to an iconic status in that it celebrates the social fabric of neighborhoods (as also did the writings of urban historian and writer Jane Jacobs), in stark contrast to Robert Moses’ urban renewal plans that follow throughout the rest of the episode.

THE YOUNG BRAVES (1968) was made by Mike Jacobhson, then 17 years old, and at that time a member of the Henry Street Settlement Movie Club. The objective of the club was to encourage the interest and participation of young people in making movies in their communities. Light-hearted in tone, the film captures the daily life of pre-teenage boys on New York’s Lower East Side. They transcend their social environment (surrounded by broken windows and trash) by playfully miming for the camera.

With the onset of a worldwide depression in the 1930s, the sense of wonder about man’s ability to construct landscapes of metal and glass (as exemplified in Strand and Sheeler’s MANHATTA) was overshadowed by concern for the human problems these very buildings had created. THE CITY (US, 1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke) was made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The  narrative shifts from the peaceful order of small towns to unfit city living conditions, finally offering a solution in planned community developments. The magnificent score by Aaron Copland creates the shifting tone for each of the three different sections of this film.

The emotional and visual power of this film lies in its central sequence depicting urban life.  Images of destruction and poverty in THE CITY provide stark contrast to those of construction and elegance in MANHATTA. Frames of dark streets and tenements suppressed in shadow in The City supplant shots of sunlight dappling on the water in MANHATTA. The process of building as glorified by scenes of excavation and derricks in MANHATTA is contrasted in THE CITY with symbols of urban blight, including shots of tenements, broken windows, fires in garbage cans, traffic jams, fenders of cars crashing together, and ambulances. The city’s decay, rather than its progress, is revealed.   

The physical chaos and psychological pressure inherent in urban living is depicted through rapid cutting, the hurried movement in successive shots of masses of people in different directions (overflowing the edges of the frame), and the frenetic pace of the accompanying music score. THE CITY condenses time through shots of people rushing and vehicles zipping across the frame, and by rapid editing techniques. The masterful control of framing and editing in THE CITY reaches a crescendo in the noontime eating sequence. In a series of shots, machines (toasters, pancake turners, coffee percolators) outpace the people eating. All the human motions—the waitress making sandwiches and the people sipping coffee—duplicate the efficiency and precision of the machines. Mechanical and human functions are broken into separate shots and shown in close-up. People and objects are transformed into finely tuned, rhythmic movements. 

Following World War II, to counter the increased emphasis on mechanization and conformity, avant-garde filmmakers in the United States used cinema as a means of expressing their inner states of consciousness. A vast repertoire of techniques was employed to represent subjective awareness, including the use of distorting lenses, multiple exposures, and a movement from representational images toward abstraction.   

New York’s elevated trains also inspired the making of experimental city symphony films, including Carson Davidson’s 3RD AVE. EL (1954) and THE WONDER RING (US, 1955), made by Stan Brakhage and commissioned by fellow artist Joseph Cornell. Whereas Davidson’s film is shot in a straight photography style similar to Strand and Sheeler’s MANHATTA, Brakhage’s movie portrays the more abstract aspect of a parallel journey. He constructs his narrative with the unique focus of the quality of light; additionally, through selective framing and superimposed reflections, he reveals only fragments of buildings and glimpses of human figures. Figurative images are beautifully transformed into formal plays of light, whether reflected from the train stairs or refracted from the edifices outside the elevated train’s window. In this very same year, the Third Avenue El was torn down, leaving these two experimental films as expressive legacies of a bygone mode of urban New York City transportation. 

In BRIDGES-GO-ROUND (US, 1958), dancer and filmmaker Shirley Clarke pays homage to the majestic bridges spanning the harbors of New York City. Using a mobile camera, superimposed images, and rhythmic editing patterns, Clarke unmoors the bridges from their foundations. These concrete and steel girders and spans dance across the frame, resulting in choreography of abstract forms. This version of the film has a jazz score by Teo Macero (there is another version with an electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron).   

Frank and Caroline Mouris’ CONEY (1975) is a masterwork of pixilation (i.e., stop-motion frame-by-frame animation) together with superimposed imagery of Coney Island. A dizzying travelogue of people on the beach, the boardwalk, and nearby streets, as well as of the iconic Wonder Wheel and Parachute Jump, CONEY fractures the continuity of the natural world, mixing seasons and times of day and night.  The filmmakers propel the film forward in a matter that transforms a vision of Coney Island into a sensory overload.  The sequences of the amusement park lighting up the darkened sky brings to mind CONEY ISLAND AT NIGHT (1905, Edison Co.), an early cinema film portraying the attractions illuminated by light bulbs at a point in time soon after electricity was being utilized to light the exterior of buildings.

Like MANHATTA, Francis Thompson’s NY, NY (US, 1957) is structured around a day in the city. This film shows objects like those in MANHATTA, including building cranes and light dappling on water. But in NY, NY, these entities are processed through prisms, distorting mirrors, and special lenses, in opposition to Strand’s principles of “straight” photography. The shapes of individual objects are severely distorted and multiplied innumerable times in the frame. Disorientation abounds. Objects defy gravity. Skyscrapers, streets, and people are transformed into curvilinear shapes, extending and compressing like funhouse mirrors. Two buildings float upside down in mid-air, steel girders rest suspended in space, buses bend back on themselves, skyscrapers bulge, and alarm clocks shatter into slivered pieces patched together. Many objects are so distorted that the resultant frames, containing irregularly shaped splotches and rough edges, have the look of Abstract Expressionist painting and of Op art of the period.   The percussive score by Gene Forrell accentuates the fragmentation of the imagery. 

Changing perception is the subject of this film. In NY, NY, the filmmaker moves the camera within a shot so as to alter objects from solid forms to fluid ones; frozen images reveal the wavy distortion of surfaces; a multitude of geometric, linear, and curvilinear patterns fill diverse frames; and boldly changing color schemes splash throughout the film. The focus on curvilinear forms in NY, NY contrasts sharply with the angular lines in MANHATTA. The plane of the horizon line is broken, and the image is wavy, rocking, unsettling. Despite its humorous tone and colorful look, NY, NY is a film reflecting the uncertainty of modern-day existence.