Manhatta

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Movie
German title Manhatta
Original title Manhatta
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1921
length 10 mins
Rod
Director Charles Sheeler , Paul Strand
camera Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand

Manhatta is a silent documentary film that the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler and his friend, the photographer Paul Strand , shot in America in 1921 to express their love for the city of New York . They were inspired by Walt Whitman's poem Mannahatta , which gave the ten-minute long film its title. The name comes from the language of the Algonquin Indians, who were the first inhabitants of Manhattan , and there meant "hilly island" or "island of the many hills".

action

Manhatta covers everything from the beginning of the day to the evening: from the arrival of the people on the Staten Island Ferry at the southern tip of Manhattan to the final picture with sunset. The 65 shots that show Lower Manhattan at the beginning of the twentieth century, with many more houses than people, are strung together in a loose narrative structure, rather freely associative. The 12 subtitles are quotations from Walt Whitman's main work Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 .

Sequence:

  • Title City of the world ...

Harbor view with skyline

  • Title When million-footed Manhattan ...

Ferry comes in, people get off, pour into town; Contrast: cemetery: quiet people, commercial building: people in a hurry

  • Title High growths of Iron ...

Skyscraper Views

  • Title The building of cities

Worker on construction site, crane

  • Title Where our topt marble ...

Urban canyons, steam from chimneys in changing perspectives

  • Title City of hurried and sparkling waters ...

Harbor view, ships

  • Title This world all spanned with iron rails ...

Locomotives, smoke from their chimneys

  • Title With lines of steam ships ...

Passenger steamers and tug boats , steam from chimneys

  • Title Shapes of the bridges ...

Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway

  • Title On the river ...

Tugs pull barges

  • Title Where the city's ceaseless crowd moves on ...

View through the balustrade of the street with people hurrying, suburban trains, trams, traffic

  • Title Gorgeous clouds of sunset ...

sunset

background

Manhatta is the only film that Charles Sheeler was involved in. He became famous as a photographer and above all as a painter of industrial architecture. Sheeler later used several takes of the film as a template for paintings. The pictures were shot with a French camera that Sheeler had purchased for $ 1,600.

The primary goal of the two filmmakers was to explore the relationship between film and photography. Many settings are based on photographs: camera movements are reduced to a minimum, as are random movements within a setting. Each picture presents a carefully arranged view of the city in an abstract composition. The subtitles, acting like headings for the following pictures, reproduce suitable excerpts from Walt Whitman's poetry .

reception

The film historian Jan-Christopher Horak describes “Manhatta” as the first avant-garde film produced in the USA.

In the history of film, Manhatta is regarded as the first of those city symphonies, as they were later and in other places by filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann ( Berlin - Die Sinfonie der Großstadt , 1927), Dsiga Wertow ( The man with the camera , 1929) or Joris Ivens ( Regen , 1929) were filmed: through assembly and through the structuring forms possible in assembly, orderly approaches to the big city.

The film was recognized by the Washington Library of Congress in 1995 as "culturally significant" and was proposed for inclusion in the list of films worth preserving at the United States National Film Registry . It was first used in October 2005 for a DVD edition.

Lore

The oldest surviving copy of Manhatta was a 35mm duplicate drawn in England in 1949, apparently from a rental copy that had not been returned after a showing at the London Film Society in 1927. Her condition was anything but satisfactory:

"Unfortunately, the film, as it had been handed down to us, was a mess. It shook, was very soft, contrasty and dirty, just terrible in relation to the pristine still images on exhibit. Right then and there, I decided that not only was a full 2K digital restoration needed but that it would prove whether or not a vintage film such as Manhatta could benefit from the process. "

(Posner 2005)

In January 2009, film archivist Bruce Posner carried out a thorough restoration in collaboration with specialist company Lowry Digital Images in Burbank, Calif. on behalf of the Museum Of Modern Art ; the work took nearly four years. Donald Sosin composed new music for orchestra to accompany the restored version.

literature

  • anonymous: Ecrire et filmer l'art. In: Novo. Chic Médias / Médiapop, Strasbourg, Bas-Rhin, France / Mulhouse, Haut-Rhin, France, No. 27, December 2013, p. 77, (MG), ISSN  1969-9514
  • Chris Dähne: The city symphonies of the 1920s - architecture between film, photography and literature. transcript Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8394-2124-6 , pp. 115, 118, 167, 198, 299, 328 u. 360
  • Jeffrey Geiger: American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation. Edinburgh University Press, 2011, pp. 66, 73-75.
  • Jan-Christopher Horak : Lovers of Cinema. The First American Film Avant-garde, 1919–1945. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995, pp. ix, 10, 25, 31, 205, 241.
  • Dave Kehr : Avant-Garde, 1920 Vintage, Is Back in Focus. In: New York Times. November 6, 2008.
  • Ekkehard Knörer: 1921 - Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler: Manhatta. (= Magical History Tour. 26). In: Cargo. Media-Film-Culture No. 29, October 17, 2010.
  • Schaedel: New York history. A collection of images, films and texts on the history of New York City . Posted by Schaedel at blogspot.de on Saturday, November 26th, 2011
  • Holly Willis: Proud and Passionate City. Community Television of Southern California, January 19, 2009.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b cf. Knörer (2010).
  2. ↑ according to Kehr (2008).
  3. ↑ Horak p. 31, Kehr (2008): This resolutely modernist work, with its Cubist perspectives and percussive rhythms, most likely was, in the words of the film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, the first avant-garde film produced in the United States.
  4. ↑ The genre of the urban symphony takes up the principles of composition and thus leads to an unprecedented audiovisual presentation of modern spaces. This spread at the beginning of the 20th century with the prosperous development of the metropolises: New York, Paris, Berlin. See Dähne p. 188 and others.
  5. ↑ cf. DVD Early American Avantgarde Film 1893–1941 at unseen-cinema.com
  6. ↑ cf. “For“ Manhatta ”the oldest surviving copy - or“ element ”in archivist speak - is a 35-millimeter duplicate made in England in 1949, apparently from a projection print that had never been returned after a screening at the London Film Society in 1927 . " (D. Kehr, November 6, 2008)