Three years after the release of his first film, Seeing the World: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y., Rudy Burckhard (1914–99) released a rather different follow-up, which he titled Pursuit of Happiness. Whereas Seeing the World was a sound film, featuring a jazzy soundtrack and some tongue-in-cheek voiceover narration, Pursuit of Happiness was an intentionally silent film. And while Burckhardt’s first film only fleetingly called to mind his photographic practice—primarily in its subway portraits, which are reminiscent of those of both Burckhardt and Walker Evans from the same period—Pursuit of Happiness was a direct extension of the young photographer’s still work. Burckhardt was quickly becoming one of the most notable street photographers of his time, one who first made a mark with his shots of architectural details, logos and advertisements, and store-front signage, as well as with his fascination with the choreography and the style of pedestrians striding its throbbing sidewalks and negotiating its dizzying amounts of traffic. Pursuit of Happiness was shot at the very same time that Burckhardt was producing his first important works of New York street photography, and the film shares a very similar compositional style and many of the same concerns, and, in fact, a number of his most famous still photographs are directly quoted and transformed into moving pictures.
Strictly speaking, Pursuit of Happiness is not really a full-blown city symphony as much as it is a collection of studies of the details, the urban ephemera, and the visual motifs that were of such interest to so many of the modernist photographers and cinematographers of the period—foot traffic, modern traffic and congestion, storefront windows, advertising, and so on. It doesn’t share the scope or the desire to suggest that somehow one day in the life of a city has been captured that we see in so many other city symphonies. However, as the film progresses, its editing becomes increasingly daring, and suddenly real-time shots of pedestrians are replaced with fast-motion, slow-motion, and freeze-frame versions, frames are rotated 90°, 180°, and then 270°, split-screen compositions are created, and complicated and disorienting studies of reflections are presented. The film ends with a flurry of multiple exposures and superimpositions, all of which indicate that Burckhardt was well-versed in the techniques and formal experimentation of the most avant-garde city symphonies of the interwar years, and especially the work of Dziga Vertov and the Kino-Eye group.
Finally, the film’s title serves as a clever play on words, simultaneously commenting on the American Dream, the relentless drive of New York’s pedestrians, and the commercialism of its windows, walls, and signs, as well as the pleasures of a street photographer in tune with his environment.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Lopate, Philip and Katz, Vincent, Rudy Burckhardt (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).
Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).
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