Jay Leyda’s (1910–88) contribution to the city symphony phenomenon presents a stark temporal and spatial alternative to the day-in-the-life-of-a-city structure that one finds so frequently in these films. As its title suggests, A Bronx Morning is an ode to morning activities in the South Bronx neighborhood that Leyda lived in at the time. It is composed of just three simple intertitles—which together form the sentence, “The Bronx does business and the Bronx lives on the street.”—along with an impressive array of street-level and street-focused shots that show a keen eye for the color and texture of everyday life.
Robert Haller has commented that Leyda’s film amounts to “a city symphony on an intimate scale,” and, sure enough, the film begins with a standard city symphony motif—the arrival into the city—but instead of a ferryboat (as in Manhatta) or a speeding locomotive (as in Berlin), Leyda ushers us into the Bronx via elevated railway. Then, instead of the monumentalism typical of the New York city symphonies, the film provides us with a study of the patterns—both physical and social—of the Bronx’s street life. Leyda’s vision of his neighborhood was directly inspired by the Parisian photographer Eugène Atget, whose work had only recently been introduced to the world through the admiration of the Surrealists, and the film contains clear homages to Atget—most notably in the form of its treatment of shop windows and mannequins. But the film also shows the influence of Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott—both of whom had just recently returned to New York from Paris, both of whom were also devotees of Atget, and both of whom were part of the same New York Film and Photo League set as Leyda—as well as Paul Strand’s 1915–17 New York series, and its exuberant treatment of children’s street games anticipates Helen Levitt’s work by a number of years.
Leyda’s A Bronx Morning is a very personal and impressionistic depiction of an Outer Borough neighborhood, and, as such, it stands as a particularly anti-iconic North American city film. It is not a film about the new New York, either—it features no skyscrapers, no construction sites—if anything, its focus has more to do with the persistence of the human-scale, the horizontal, and the traditional (as emblematized by its fixation on Hebrew signage) in the face of sweeping change. And herein lies the film’s retrospective poignancy, for Leyda’s neighborhood was one of many in the South Bronx that was destroyed beginning in the 1950s to make way for Robert Moses’s “Expressway World,” a tragedy that was captured all too eloquently by Marshall Berman in the pages of All That is Solid Melts Into Air.
Leyda moved to New York City from Dayton, Ohio in 1929 to work as Ralph Steiner’s assistant. By 1932 he had become interested in becoming a political filmmaker and he enrolled in the cinematography course at Moscow’s State Film School and brought a copy of his film with him. He managed to show A Bronx Morning to Eisenstein, and, on the basis of this screening, he was admitted into the directing course. When he returned to New York, Leyda became an assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He would go on to translate Eisenstein’s writings into English, and his 1960 book Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film became a standard work of film history.
Anthony Kinik and Eva Hielscher
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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