In 1921, the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) and the photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976), who had been introduced by Alfred Stieglitz and were part of his circle, released a ten-minute short entitled Manhatta. The project had been conceived as an extension of the artists’ shared interest in “cityscape architecture and its application to visual design,” and it came together soon after Sheeler purchased a 35mm Debrie L’Interview Type E in 1919, a camera that was relatively lightweight and mobile and was a favorite of newsreel cameramen and those shooting on location. Manhatta was shot in the spring and summer of 1920 in Lower Manhattan and edited soon afterwards. By October 1920 Sheeler and Strand were in a position to screen the film privately to friends. Manhatta’s premiere was at the Rialto Theater on Broadway on 24 July 1921, where it played for only one week as part of an eight-act variety bill and was advertised as New York the Magnificent. Two years later, however, Manhatta’s fascinating afterlife began, when the film was brought to Paris by Marcel Duchamp and others to appear as part of Tristan Tzara’s notorious Dada festival, “La Soirée du Coeur à Barbe,” where it played alongside the music of Erik Satie and the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. There, the film was retitled Les Fumées de New York after one of its signature motifs: steam and smoke. The film was re-released in New York in 1926, playing at the Cameo Theater and the Film Guild, and it was now billed under its actual title, Manhatta, for the very first time. The following year, it travelled back across the Atlantic to appear in the 18th London Film Society annual, and soon afterwards it went missing for over two decades, only to turn up in the British Film Archives in 1949.
As Jan-Christopher Horak and others have pointed out, the film unwittingly initiated a number of motifs that would become staples of the city symphony film later in the 1920s, including: a dawn-to-dusk structure; a fascination with modern architecture (especially Lower Manhattan’s dense concentration of skyscrapers), modern construction, modern industry, modern transportation, New York’s “culture of congestion,” and a profound interest in using unusual vantage points and disorienting compositions in order to capture this material.
The one feature that seems most at odds with what would come to be known as the city symphony style is Manhatta’s heavy reliance on intertitles, but it is important to note that they are not used in an expository manner, but in a poetic one, and that, in fact, they were drawn from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The fact that the Manhatta project was launched in 1919, the centennial of Whitman’s birth, helps to explain the nature of this homage, as well as the film’s odd Whitmanesque title.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Horak, Jan-Christopher, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s ‘Manhatta’,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 267–87.
Lucic, Karen, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Stange, Maren (ed.), Paul Strand: Essays on His Life (New York: Aperture, 1990).
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