Manhatta
Dir: Charles Sheeler
and Paul Strand
Scr: N/A
Phot: Charles Sheeler
and Paul Strand
Ed: unknown
Premiere: 1921
9:52
Just pictures. Pictures of buildings, bridges, trains,
boats, and the people leaking out of and into them. That’s the premise of this
10-minute ribbon of reality, captured and preserved forever as a monument to
the look and feel of a big city in the last century. Its largely static shots
turn the urban landscape into a triumph of abstract line and form.
It’ been tagged as the first avant-garde film made in
America. It’s also the parent of later, similar films such as Alberto
Cavalcanti’s 1926 Rien que les Heures (‘Nothing
but Time’), Robert Flaherty’s 1927 Twenty-Four-Dollar
Island, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin:
Symphony of a City (also 1927); and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Sheeler was an artist who turned to photography early on in
his career, who was consumed by a love of documenting technology, industry, and
large-scale change. Strand, solely a photographer, weighed interests and themes
markedly similar to Sheeler’s, making the natural collaborators.
The grand accomplishment of painter Sheeler and photographer
Strand is to exit the need for narrative entirely. The film is what it is, a
seemingly simple recording of everyday reality. But it is grander than that. It
is an echo of the early cinema’s reliance on recording and screening
travelogues, actual visits to far-off places such as the Holy Land.
This film focuses on New York City, treating it as an unknown
quantity to be examined and considered almost from an archaeological
perspective. Steam shovels gape, wrecking balls cavort. The city tears itself
down, rebuilds itself, climbs higher and higher. The interpolated, laudatory
quotes from Walt Whitman’s poetry reinforces the sense of wonder Manhatta is trying to convey. It’s the
city as a poem in steel and brick.
In the end, the film shows us abstract mass against mass, a
nearly alien, strictly geometric portrait. The only real creatures at large are
large mechanical ones — trains, boats. People are ants, at best scrabbling
along the edges of a graveyard (Trinity Church’s). New York City personified.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Tol’able David’.