In 1927, Robert Flaherty (1884–1951), the father of the modern documentary film, and a director first and foremost associated with traditional cultures and their struggles with nature, released a “camera impression” of New York City, the ultimate icon of urban modernity. Although there is no direct indication that Flaherty had seen Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Twenty-four Dollar Island bears a very strong resemblance to this earlier film, especially in its fascination with skyscrapers, tugboats, construction and industry, and smokestacks. But Flaherty’s film differs from that of Sheeler and Strand in two fundamental ways. First, it includes a short historical introduction, which uses maps and prints to illustrate the apocryphal tale of Manhattan’s purchase for the bargain price of “24 dollars.” This conceit underlines the status of the “Island Manhattes” as a piece of property first and foremost, and it sets up an astounding dissolve from a map of New Amsterdam circa 1656, to an aerial view of New York c. 1926, now covered in skyscrapers, stretching as far as the eye can see, and with a population of 8,000,000. Second, the film displays Flaherty’s newfound interest in the use of telephoto lenses, and especially in their ability to compress space when shooting across the harbor towards the Lower Manhattan skyline, or down into the city’s vast “canyons” from atop its growing number of skyscrapers. The effect achieved was one of taking New York’s “culture of congestion” and making it feel even more congested, more oppressive, more claustrophobic. As Flaherty himself explained, Twenty-four Dollar Island was “not a film of human beings, but of skyscrapers which they had erected, completely dwarfing humanity itself.” In other words, the film was intended to be a critique of modernity, a goal that on some level it shared with Nanook (1922), but its subject matter and form could not have been more different.
Critics were split on Twenty-four Dollar Island, with many expressing great admiration for the film and commenting on its “interesting and unusual shots” and its “well nigh perfect” direction, and one commentator going so far as to exclaim, “This [film] was the most thrilling, fascinating and generally beautiful picture that I have ever been privileged to witness.” Others, however, were highly critical, chastising the film for its lack of story, its lack of titles, its repetitiveness, its two-reel length, and its claustrophobia. In fact, one viewer described the experience of Twenty-four Dollar Island this way: “Not an open space—one feels breathless and overpowered—crushed by the machine age.” Interestingly, of those critics who were impressed by the film, many compared it favorably to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which had had its New York premiere earlier that same year, on 6 March.
Twenty-four Dollar Island suffered an ignominious fate after a poor run at New York’s massive Roxy Theatre. As Lewis Jacobs later reported, “After cutting down Twenty-four Dollar Island from two reels to one, the Roxy directors used the picture as a background projection for one of their lavishly staged dance routines called The Sidewalks of New York.”
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Horak, Jan-Christopher, “The First American Film Avant-Garde,” in Jan- Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 16–66.
Jacobs, Lewis, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1939 [1967]).
Rotha, Paul, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography. Ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
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