On Manhatta

Lisette Model’s photograph taken spontaneously on the streets of Manhattan
Image via NOWNESS

Perhaps it was the unusual poetic beauty of its subject, its brevity, or the fact that I’m still basking in the warm honeymoon glow of a recent pilgrimage wearing a pair of rose-coloured eyeglasses I picked up there (and have been unable to remove since)  – or an apt cocktail of all three - but Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s 1921 ode to early modern New York, the City Symphony Manhatta, held my gaze unwaveringly for its almost ten minute duration, admittedly unlike the other two Symphonies before it; so much so that I felt compelled to don one of those tacky (but great) and ubiquitous I <3 NY t-shirts and never take it off. Or perhaps not; instead a blog entry will have to suffice for now.

The film, much like its contemporaries, chooses a loose, vignette based narrative in favor of a linear plot; and, where other symphonies shirk intertitles, Strand and Sheeler intersperse stanzas extracted from Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Leaves Of Grass’ to both inform the languid series of takes in between and imbue the film with the pace and poeticism of the prose form. Whitman’s stanzas are visually realized, almost word-for-word, or word-for-image, from the first frames: a ferry approaching the South Sea Port of Manhattan, at first from the perspective of a passenger on board a boat which we soon see is teaming with commuters and then from a height far removed from the masses, is paired with intertitles reading: 


City of the world
(for all races are here)
City of tall facades
Of marble and iron,
Proud and passionate city...
When million footed Manhattan
Unpent, descends
To its pavement


We are simultaneously immersed within and distanced from the masses that form the lifeblood of this city, the million footed citizens we now see descending from the ferry into the city. By contrasting perspectives of both a passenger on board and a bystander, a witness from above, the cinematic apparatus is removed from an entirely human field of vision and perception; we are at once both a part of and a participant in this city from the level of the street and from beyond.

The film, though silent, takes on an oral and aural rhythm by virtue of the extracts interspersed throughout – emulating the spoken word in its tone of grandeur and awe at the marvel of modernity, or at least, that’s how I found myself relishing in the resplendent descriptions of ‘high growths of iron, slender, strong, splendidly uprising toward clear skies’. The camera then luxuriates in these images, hardly moving from the highly abstract compositions created by the cinematic lens. This provides an interesting contrast to the nature of what is being presented: where Manhattan is usually considered a city of perpetual motion, it is interesting that here the camera provides moments of stillness far above this bustling metropolis. Here of course Strand’s photographic background, with his eye for composure and the explicit distinction between the tallest building and the smallest laborer, comes to the fore in an elaborate exploration of the poetics of scale.

The camera then continues to alternate between the city at eye-level and the city from above, juxtaposing images of construction – building sites with subterranean roots – with panoramic vistas filmed from atop skyscrapers. From this privileged vantage point we bear witness to the striking architectural facades of these colossal modern structures, steadfast and unwavering, the only glimpse of an interior life gestured to in the forms of anonymous masses of workers and the billowing steam which pours forth from rooftop vents – at once both a tangible presence and an ephemeral specter of impermanence in contrast to these (seemingly) permanent monuments to modernity.