New York the Magnificent 

One hundred years ago today … The short film Manhatta was screening at the Rialto Theater, on the third day of a one-week run.

As this writing, you can see the film on YouTube here. If, by the time you are reading this, that link is no good, try this one or this one. 

Juan A. Suarez summarizes the film and its impact:

Painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand’s Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis–the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention. (85)

Sheeler and Strand shot the film over several months in 1920. Jan-Christopher Horak describes the production history:

Sheeler and Strand worked on the film from early 1920 until at least September of that same year. They shot it from a series of rooftops and streets in lower Manhattan. Sites, all within a five-block radius, included Battery Park, the Staten Island Ferry docks, Wall Street, Broadway, and Trinity Place. The film was probably edited in October, and apparently both artists took part. (Horak, 269)

We can add to Horak that we know that shooting on Wall Street was completed before the bombing on September 16, 1920 (about which see our two posts). The moment seen below shows pedestrians walking past 23 Wall Street, the J.P. Morgan building, whose windows were blown up by the bomb (as seen here.)

Manhatta is sometimes called Mannahatta. Both title refer to the Lenape name for Manhattan; Mannahatta also refers to the Walt Whitman poem that provides the film’s intertitles. It was released under the title New York the Magnificent, which Horak suggests as “possibly chosen by the Rialto Theatre” (269).

The film’s debut week was as part of a program whose main feature was a British movie The Mystery Road, and which also featured a comedic short, The Fall Guy, starring Oliver Hardy. New York the Magnificent  was not listed in the Rialto advertisements and the media seems to have hardly taken note, with one exception being critic Harriette Underhill. Reviewing The Mystery Road for the Tribune, Underhill responds favorably to Manhatta, and notes that the band played geographically appropriate songs.

As a matter of fact it wasn't nearly so interesting as the picture called "New York the Magnificent." This showed scenes and related facts about what every New Yorker thinks is the greatest city in the world. Hugo Riesenfeld had the orchestra play all of the old favorites like "Annie Rooney," "Sidewalks of New York," "She May Have Seen Better Days," "My Mother Was a Lady," etc. Two minutes more of it and there would have been community singing–a few intrepid souls were tuning up, as it was. (“On the Screen. New York Tribune, 26 July, p. 6)

Suarez describes Manhatta’s ensuing reception.

Manhatta was produced through most of 1920 and early 1921 and premiered on July at the Rialto Theater, a mainstream commercial cinema in New York City. Afterwards, it fitfully circulated in Europe as a cult movie and was revived in the United States toward the mid-1920s by the newly created film societies and art theaters, called at the time “little cinemas.’’ Despite its limited success the film had an enormous influence. (86)

References/ Further reading:

Horak, Jan-Christopher. “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-garde, 1919-1945. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. 267-286. 

Suarez, Juan A. “City Space, Technology, Popular Culture: The Modernism of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta.” Journal of American Studies, 36 (2002). 85-106. 

– Jonathan Goldman, December 20, 1921

TAGS: cinema, movies, documentary, avant-garde, review, arts, modernism, technology, transportation, photography, alienation