After an early career in motion pictures, where he worked with the Vitagraph Company, Browning (1895–1961) opened a photography studio with his brother in the early 1920s, and it was as a professional photographer that he made his living. Browning shot prolifically in the 1920s and 1930s, and his work ranged from artfully composed street views taken in the “straight” style, to social documentary photographs (especially after the onset of the Great Depression), to commissioned commercial work for clients like Vanity Fair and photomontage compositions for the likes of Cosmopolitan. Like a number of his New York contemporaries featured elsewhere in this collection, Browning had ties to the New York Film and Photo League, and his work was exhibited alongside that of Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Ralph Steiner. During this period, where Browning appeared to be at his most socially committed, he also produced a city symphony of New York that was released under the title City of Contrasts and that proved to be fairly influential.
The film appears to have been released in two versions—a silent version, and a sound version featuring a score, non-synchronous sound effects, and some acerbic narration by Kelvin Keech—and the disparities between the two make for very different viewing experiences. This is most starkly evident during a sequence where Browning documents the grim conditions within one of New York’s “Hooverville” shanty towns with empathy, just as he had in his still photography. But in the sound version the narrator’s mocking tone is in full effect, referring to the desperation on view as a desirable example of “pioneer living,” and one that actually embodies the American Dream, for “each own their own home.”
As its title suggests, the film is principally interested in capturing New York City as the vast site of powerful and compelling contrasts such as night vs. day, rich vs. poor, downtown vs. uptown, high vs. low, Occident vs. Orient, and so on. But as William Uricchio has pointed out, close inspection indicates that Browning was a savvy filmmaker, and his interest in contrast extended beyond mere theme to include composition and editing.
Browning’s film appears to have been a direct influence on two later city symphonies: Manhattan Medley (1931), which is attributed to Bonney Powell, and Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934) by Gordon Sparling. Both films seem to have borrowed scenes directly from City of Contrasts: a touristic interest in Chinatown and the Lower East Side in the case of Manhattan Medley, and a virtuosic presentation of the city’s vibrant nightlife in the case of Rhapsody in Two Languages.
Without the narration, Browning’s bravura camerawork and his eye for visual ironies (especially during sequences having to do with doormen and sandwich-board men in one case, and rooftop scenes in another) is more clearly evident, and at times Browning’s film even calls to mind Vigo’s À propos de Nice, most notably during a scene that documents the carnivalesque surrealism of Coney Island.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Uricchio, William, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314.
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