Rudy Burckhardt (1914–99), the Swiss-born photographer, filmmaker, and bohemian, produced Seeing the World: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y., an offbeat ode to his new hometown, in 1937, just two years after he’d emigrated to New York. He made it with the help of a number of high-profile friends he had made since his arrival: Virginia Welles, an actor who also happened to be married to Orson Welles; Joseph Cotten, the actor (who would become an integral part of the Welles’ ensemble and a major film star, and who is mistakenly listed as “Joseph Cotton” in the film’s credits); and Edwin Denby, the poet, all of whom were appearing in Orson Welles’ landmark production of Horse Eats Hat (1936) for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre at the time that Burckhardt began shooting.
The film takes the form of a mock travelogue, featuring informal, highly colloquial narration by Donnie Brooke Alderson, which introduces its viewers to New York via a shot of the Statue of Liberty (“First to great a visitor to New York is a lady—the Statue of Liberty. Oh, ain’t she beautiful!”). What follows is an idiosyncratic tour of New York that begins with an attempt to document some of New York’s famed sites (Wall Street, Trinity Church, the Brooklyn Bridge), but soon veers away from the logic and expectations of conventional tourism, stopping off at the 42nd Street elevated railway station but refusing to represent Times Square (“42nd Street! Times Square! The heart of … [garbled] … that we skip it …”), before moving from the center of New York (Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue) to its margins (Tenth Avenue, Eleventh Avenue, the riverfront). While the film is ostensibly a sound film, one that relies heavily on Alderson’s narration and a frequently jazzy soundtrack, in some ways the travelogue is merely an excuse to set up two silent skits that highlight New York’s stark contrasts. The first of these skits (starring Welles) has to do with a high society couple that lives on Park Avenue, providing an opportunity to lampoon the Social Registry set and their philistine attitudes toward modern art. The second takes place in a riverside dive bar and has to do with a violent showdown between two hoodlums (one of them played by Cotten).
While Seeing the World’s shaky camerawork and awkward narration mark it as a minor work, the film remains notable for some strikingly modernist compositions (high-angle camerawork, abstract patterning), for an extended travelling sequence along the Third Avenue elevated railway that anticipates similar sequences in post-war city films such as D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1953–8) and Stan Brakhage’s Wonder Ring (1955). The film’s other highlight is its highly ironic finale, which purports to leave its viewers with a shot of the city at dawn (“And so we leave New York in the light of early morning …”), but does so with the use of toy versions of the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center, in a manner reminiscent of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926).
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Lopate, Philip and Katz, Vincent, Rudy Burckhardt (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).
Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).
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