Skyscraper Symphony (1929) by Frenchman Robert Florey (1900–79) explores the effects of modernity on the urban dweller in concert with other city symphony films. Yet unlike such early variations as Manhatta (1921) and Twenty- four Dollar Island (1927), the film overlooks the city’s traditional status as a bustling commercial seaport, focusing solely on the city’s lofty buildings often seen through radically oblique angles and destabilizing viewpoints.
Like his earlier Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (with Slavko Vorkapich, 1928) Skyscraper Symphony explores the adverse impact of urban life while incorporating a tourist’s gaze. As a “Parisian in America,” he problematizes the city symphony film, by combining excitement and humor with ambivalence, showing subjective views of looming buildings and employing extensive footage of architectural contrasts, juxtaposing traditional, often French-inspired stylistic idioms with the angular configurations of New York’s new, stepped-back Art Deco skyscrapers. Considerable attention is paid to the entrapping effects of an uptown skyscraper hospital complex devoid of urban inhabitants, which acts as a synecdoche for metropolitan life.
The major cinematic precursor to Skyscraper Symphony is the lost travelogue Bonjour New York, in which Florey recorded Maurice Chevalier’s arrival in 1928. Skyscraper Symphony was shot in the early morning, after Florey was kept awake by the pounding of the riveter’s gun. He was responding to New York post-war building boom which created a virtual “skyscraper mania,” affecting both urban geography and popular imagery.
Skyscraper Symphony possesses a circular temporal logic, in which its denouement serves as a beginning. Crosscutting from an excavation site to the panning of an adjacent skyscraper, the film signals that Manhattan’s tall buildings will rise interminably, linking past, present, and future time.
Merrill Schleier
further reading
Horak, Jan-Christopher, Lovers of Cinema: The First American Avant Garde: 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
Taves, Brian, Robert Florey: The French Expressionist (London and New Jersey, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987).
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