Made at the peak of the city symphony cycle, Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929) explores the implied effects of modernity, while employing a combination of documentary and experimental techniques. Like Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921) and Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), Skyscraper Symphony captures spatio-temporal flux in urban space. Yet Skyscraper Symphony does not simply record modernity in generic terms or create a clichéd sense of urban intoxication as it has previously been characterized; rather, Frenchman Florey captures the impact of post-World War I urban transformations in New York in particular, which create a tension in the film. While the director invokes a sense of a material “place” that is identifiable as post-war Manhattan; ultimately, he is more interested in using subjective camerawork to convey how the city’s specific type of modern metropolitanism affects a European transplant. In contrast to other New York variations of the city symphony cycle, however, the film overlooks Manhattan’s traditional status as a bustling commercial seaport with its skyline serving as an image of progress, instead Florey focuses almost solely on the city’s tall buildings as modernity’s dystopian ciphers while simulating the destabilizing physical and psychic effects of city life.1 In this regard, his film shares a vision similar to that of Metropolis (1927) by another European, Fritz Lang, whose own journey to New York in 1924, resulted in images of an overwhelming megalopolis crowded by mountains of impinging skyscrapers.
As a “Parisian in America,” Florey thus amplifies the city symphony genre, by combining both a tourist’s excitement and humor with ambivalence toward his adopted home, devoting considerable footage to architectural contrasts, often juxtaposing traditional stylistic idioms with the angular configurations of the new Ziggurat-like Art Deco skyscrapers, which began to fill mid-town Manhattan in response to New York’s 1916 Zoning Ordinance and the development of the area around Grand Central Station. Previously American painters and photographers such as Joseph Pennell, Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and John Marin had rendered the disparity between a rapidly expanding modernity and the city’s historical structures.2 Likewise, Florey juxtaposes old and new New York, to reflect a sense of loss and nostalgia, a yearning for a former way of life that may have reminded him of his country of origin.
The film may be seen as a cross cultural journey, in which the circularity of the voyage is a metaphor for a foreigner’s yearning for home, from the site of American modernity to a starting point and back again.3 Florey renders time as non-sequential, which prompts the viewer’s vicarious disequilibrium and sense of unease. It is an excursion in reverse, beginning with a massive, impenetrable skyscraper complex in upper Manhattan, a synecdoche for an expanding urban congestion, and ends downtown at a construction site. He also undoes upper and lower spatiality in other respects, often reducing towering edifices to horizontal entities, thereby depriving them of their height and preeminence. Displaying the influence of cinéma pur and other modernist stylistic tropes (e.g., Cubism, Futurism, Dada) seen in his use of fragmented geometric shapes, mechanomorphic forms, and humorous machine antics, combined with the unconventional temporal character, he creates a proto-narrative message about the effects of skyscraperization on Manhattan.4
Robert Florey arrived in the United States in 1921 as a correspondent for Cinémagazine. After working in the French and Swiss film industries, he soon became a publicist and an assistant director in Hollywood. He made several experimental shorts before Skyscraper Symphony, of which Life and Death Of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1926–7) with Slavko Vorkapich and Gregg Toland, and The Loves of Zero (1928) survive. Inspired by George Gershwin’s urbanist musical composition Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Life and Death features many qualities of the city symphony cycle. David E. James claims that it sketches the “social conditions of studio film production and the architectural fabric of the city in which it takes place.”5 The film further foreshadows Skyscraper Symphony in its divided nature—nightmare sequences explore the adverse psychic effects of urban life while incorporating a tourist’s gaze that features various Hollywood landmarks. Both films also end grimly, in contrast to most commercial Hollywood ventures of the day, the former with tombstones and the latter with a gaping hole in the ground.
Florey went on to become a Hollywood director for various studios, including Paramount and Warner Brothers, working in a number of genres. He continued to employ subjective camerawork and architectural settings in such films as Hollywood Boulevard (1936) and the noir-inspired Johnny One-Eye (1950). According to Brian Taves, in preparation for the latter film, he made very abstract photographs of New York and various skyscraper views from street level, continuing the experimental vision of Skyscraper Symphony in his feature films.6
Life and Death commences with images of a generic city of saw-toothed skyscrapers more characteristic of New York than Los Angeles in the 1920s, whose oppressive silhouettes threaten to encroach on all who enter their lair. It chronicles the arrival of an aspiring actor or outsider who like Florey is trying to break into the film industry, but whose forehead is stamped with the moniker 9413 to underscore his anonymity and interchangeability in cutthroat Hollywood. The identification 9413 may even relate more closely to Florey—the number three may refer to him and his two collaborators, while 941 may be an inversion of Florey’s birthday, which was 14 September. One scene in particular shows the nameless aspirant’s struggle to achieve fame and fortune, ascending the metaphorical stepping-stones of success, a skyscraper-like staircase. However his frustrated gestures are repeated in an endless cinematic loop to illustrate the oppressive, assembly-line-like effort he must undergo, leading to his eventual plummeting and failure. Instead of 9413, a generic actor who performs with a stereotypical, routinized smile is selected for the part and receives accolades.
The major precursor to Skyscraper Symphony is a now lost three-reel travelogue entitled Bonjour New York!, in which Florey recorded French actor Maurice Chevalier’s arrival in the city in October of 1928 before the latter returned to Hollywood.7 Reportedly, the two Parisians embarked on a sightseeing excursion to Greenwich Village, the Bowery, the Bronx, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a visit to various New York skyscrapers, a device he would use again in the feature film Hollywood Boulevard (1936) to evoke a tourist’s gaze. This led to Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony the following year, which he shot while working the night shift at Paramount’s Astoria Studios. Kept awake by the pounding of riveters’ guns in the early morning hours after work, Florey would go out into the city streets to take in impressions and eventually shoot his film.
Giuliana Bruno refers to the mobile exploration of the city as “site- seeing,” whereby an embodied spectator activates the architecture of the urban sphere, associating it with the kinetic and emotional character of cinema itself.8 Her analysis takes into account the impact of gender on urban voyages, while also considering the way foreigners employ travel films in an imperialist manner as a mode of possession. Expanding on Bruno’s work, I suggest that Florey’s tourist excursion is a foreigner’s search for identity in dialogue with American modernity. Hence, both the enthusiastic reaction of two recent European arrivals to New York City and Florey’s sleeplessness and feelings of displacement can be understood as a record of this psychophysical tour, which is exactly what gives Skyscraper Symphony its divided or ambivalent character.
Skyscraper Symphony must be seen against a backdrop of urban development, crowding, dehumanization, and almost religious awe, or what Perry Miller and David Nye call the “technological sublime.”9 New York was undergoing what I have termed, a “skyscraper mania,” which affected both urban geography and popular imagery.10 After World War I, a massive building boom ensued, which the New York Times proclaimed with the bold headline “Titanic Forces Rear a New Skyline,” asserting that every area of the city had fallen under the spell of reconstruction. Architectural critic James C. Young reported, “A host of workers were striving to complete some 350 new buildings by the winter of 1925 and 900 other structures were in the process of rehabilitation.” 11 Between 1918 and 1930, office use in modern buildings increased tenfold, reported Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday (1931).12
The Titan City Exhibition at the Wanamaker’s department store in 1925 further celebrated the skyscrapers of the present and future with a fantastic mural-sized rendering of “The Growth of New York” by soon-to-be film set designer Willy Pogany and murals by architects Harvey Wiley Corbett and architect and Hugh Ferriss, which featured the megalopolitan, set-back structures that dominated the reconstruction of New York City after the 1916 Zoning Ordinance.13 Ferriss published his urban fantasies widely throughout the 1920s, which were later enshrined in his book The Metropolis of Tomorrow in 1929.14
While Ferriss and Corbett perceived skyscrapers as the solution for New York’s urban congestion, detractors such as architectural critic and writer Lewis Mumford explored the negative impact of tall buildings on metropolitan dwellers. In “The Intolerable City,” the latter inveighed, “One need not dwell upon the ways in which these obdurate overwhelming masses take away from the little people who walk in their shadow any semblance of human dignity as human beings.” Similarly, John Alden Carpenter’s ballet Skyscrapers (1926), with predatory set designs by Robert Edmond Jones, provided a nightmarish vision of a typical day in the life of New York and its denizens, complete with death-like skyscraper skeletons rendered in jagged shapes against a backdrop of inferno-like red and black. Likewise, Sophie Treadwell’s popular play Machinal (1928) featured a harried stenographer who worked in a skyscraper office. Rebelling against the routinization her machine existence, she murdered her slogan-spewing, boss-husband and was tried, convicted, and executed by modernity itself, in the form of electrocution.15 Numerous articles in popular journals also remarked on the auditory assault of riveters’ drills and the massive excavation sites that filled the city, which provided inhabitants with a visual sidewalk show and a cacophonous auditory symphony, the very same din that inspired Skyscraper Symphony.16
Skyscraper Symphony was shot in three days with a hand-held De Vry camera, which underscores the immediacy of the journey. This is corroborated by Florey who called the film “an architectural study of New York skyscrapers seen from way high or from down shooting up with wide and sometimes distorted angles, 24mm shots and quick pan shots with fast editing.”17 Brian Taves, who has written extensively on the filmmaker, divides Skyscraper Symphony into three discreet parts: the urban hive as still life, the shaky panning of a succession of buildings, and the introduction of the elevated train and the contrast of movement and stasis.18 I suggest that Florey also offers an experiential journey through the city, creating a sense of a newcomer’s wonder, while employing spatial strategies to underscore the skyscrapers’ scale, sameness, and overwhelming character, to signify the crushing effects of conformity, as he had in Life And Death.
Skyscraper Symphony is also heir to the emerging tradition of the New York City symphony films of both Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921) and Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1926).19 These earlier films focus largely on Manhattan’s southern port of entry and downtown region, the seat of its trade and commerce, picturing the island replete with travelling barges and billowing smokestacks, a seemingly autonomous organism that moves, breathes, creates, and expels energy. Both films record the burgeoning city as it rises—Twenty-Four Dollar Island begins with a text that reports on early Dutch settlers who built thirty houses. The filmmaker uses a match cut to transition to the congested city of eight million c. 1926, pictured by a bird’s eye view of the city’s southern tip with its dense concentration of skyscrapers. The labors of construction workers, the perennial movement to and fro of enormous mechanical shovels, and the poetic dance of crisscrossing static beams and mobile derricks underscore the theme of relentless building. Strand and Sheeler’s film pays homage to a heroic Manhattan interspersed with Whitman’s verse, from its disembarking commuters at dawn to a lone tugboat returning to port at dusk, establishing a day-in-the-life structure that would become a defining aspect of the city symphony cycle. Yet, it is also an ambivalent film, one that features ominous images of cemeteries and massive skyscraper-formed canyons that overwhelm pedestrians while Flaherty’s crowded, smoke-filled metropolis captures his typically dystopian vision of modernity.
Unlike the earlier cinematic renditions of Manhattan, Skyscraper Symphony commences uncharacteristically in uptown Manhattan with an almost four-minute exploration of James Gamble Rogers’s New York Presbyterian Hospital, a skyscraper complex of more than twelve buildings located between 165th and 168th street, which had just opened to the public in 1928.20 The new “skyscraper hospital” or “hospital block” architecture was a response to medical specialization and its increasing dependence on modern technology to cure illness, which is registered in the multitude of similar cubical, stepped-back buildings.21 Florey renders the hospital as shorthand for the city’s urban congestion and its pervasive modernity, a veritable walled city within a city, especially its former psychiatric facility, which is seen as an impenetrable compound through a succession of dissolve transitions. Each view of its multiple skyscraper fragments dominate the frame, emphasizing its scale and scope, a panoply of darkened, interlocking cubical parts and seemingly impenetrable, fortress-like views.
Florey employs the dissolves and cascades of interlocking forms to simulate disorientation. The mobile camera enters the hospital’s courtyard, which is bordered by impinging walls that dwarf and entrap, the muted light of which augments its forbidding nature. Various portions of skyscrapers are seen from radically oblique angles to underscore their abstract shapes, showing Florey’s indebtedness to Cubism and other modernist vocabularies, but also to evoke a loss of balance. Suddenly what is vertical becomes horizontal, transforming the skyscraper into an ersatz train platform, thereby thwarting its lofty hegemony, and creating a sense of what Ed Dimendberg has referred to in another context as a “nonsynchronous return of the past,” a nineteenth-century way of perceiving modernity in a twentieth century vertical city.22 Before exploring the tall courtyard buildings with up and down movement to enumerate height, the camera pauses at the walled entranceway, which resembles the nightmare sequence in Life and Death in which 9413 tries to climb the steps of a massive setback structure to no avail. Here, however, the vision is meant to emphasize the massive buildings’ density.
In the next section of the film, we are situated amidst the canyons of downtown and midtown, which register more congestion. Florey explores the dynamic shapes of the new setback skyscrapers, which resulted from Hugh Ferriss and Harvey Wiley Corbett’s structural and design solution to the 1916 Zoning Ordinance. Their zigzag contours provided visual artists with new ways of viewing skyscrapers, which one commentator noted, “cut shadowy perpendicular slices out of the sky.”23 Florey juxtaposes the zigzag-edged skyscrapers with Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913), which was nicknamed “the Cathedral of Commerce” and was still the tallest structure in Manhattan until the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931. Architect Gilbert rendered the Woolworth in a French Gothic idiom to add to its civic cachet and spiritual associations, which Florey differentiated from its ultramodern architectural neighbors.24 The contrast between these two stylistic idioms—the French Middle Ages with jazz-age modernity—is a rhetorical way of rendering the city’s ever-changing topography, thereby creating seemingly discontinuous chronotopes, while referencing the director’s own French heritage. In addition, Florey photographs the Woolworth Building from a distant, mid-range shot, reducing the grandiose building to its tiny tip and wiggling the camera—a technique also seen in Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique (1924)—to show both his experimental prowess while adding a bit of Dada sexual humor, thereby depriving the Woolworth of its scale and spiritual pretensions.
In the final sequence, which resembles a segment of Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta, Florey juxtaposes the stalwart, vertical stability of the skyscraper with the diagonal motion of an elevated train, a ballet of movement and stasis. Subsequently, the viewer is presented with a kaleidoscopic view of moving skyscraper fragments that act as a stand-in for the viewer’s urban confusion or overstimulation, which is followed by an oblique angle shot which leaves no room between the stalwart canyons. Florey employed this device again in Hollywood Boulevard (1936), as shorthand for disorientation and stimulus overload.
At various points in the film, the viewer is provided with a sense of location and specificity, providing signposts for those familiar with New York’s skyscrapers. In one scene, Florey situates us downtown on Barclay and Vesey streets, the home of Voorhees and Gmelin’s New York Telephone Building (1925). Yet the filmmaker does not simply identify architectural monuments; rather, he offers up a series of visual and written cues through the use of montage and asks us to connect the dots, through a metonymic chain of images and words, revealing his semiotic imagination. The camera fixes on both the facades of The Bank of the United States and the Fred French Building by Ives, Sloan and Robertson (1927, 45th and 5th Ave.), the keys to both Florey’s dual identity and the city’s architectural tensions.
Skyscraper Symphony ends at a point of origin with the gaping hole of a construction site—or, rather, a nascent building—which was a common sight in 1920s Manhattan, which imbues the film with a circular logic and interminability. This image is a synecdoche for the relentless rebuilding in New York noted by many commentators since the nineteenth century, therefore identifying the subterranean chasm of an emergent structure as an absent presence. The repeated crosscutting from the enormous gap to the camera’s vertical upward and downward exploration of an adjacent skyscraper, signals that the latter will metamorphose into the former, a chronotope, or a “present future.”25 Florey employs the mobility of the cinematic apparatus, linking the past, present and yet to come, to depict the unfolding of time. Yet the construction site assumes a multivalent meaning, also acting as a burial site that threatens to engulf and perhaps submerge urban inhabitants. We may view Skyscraper Symphony thus as both a symphony and an elegy to Manhattan modernity by a Parisian in New York, bringing us back once again to the film’s outset and the hospital’s looming and threatening walls.
