Movement in 'Manhatta'

The portrait of New York Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s construct in their 1921 film Manhatta does not share its stylistic agenda with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City or Dziga Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera.[i] The individual scenes of city life we witness here are not abstract fragments, studies of form and rhythm, but carefully composed vignettes. They are like individual stanzas in a poem, each moving with the same pace, rhythm and tone.[ii] 

The composition of each shot is considered with the camera positioned apart from, not within, the action documented. This camera is not like Vertov’s. It is not a part of the crowd but remains detached and unacknowledged. It is a camera that steals glances through balcony railings at the city streets below, privileging the monumental and the panoramic over the immediate and microscopic. 

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921

Ruttmann and Vertov both uncover a palimpsestic city and show us its interior spaces, its mines and sewers. Where their city is pried open with its anatomy exposed, Strand and Sheeler’s city is fully clothed. Manhatta is a study of the city as edifice, as façade. We see the thousands of tiny windows that adorn the buildings, but never once look into them. We do not see a single face, only a sea of tiny figures in uniform black overcoats and hats dwarfed by this urban colossus.

Yet, however reserved this image of the city may seem – inhabited by somber and faceless figures – it embraces certain subtle and veiled contradictions. Both the movement within each city scene and the transition from one scene to the next has a homogenized and measured pace. And yet, it is also possible to detect aberrant rhythms buried within the solemn architecture of some shots.

The Smoke. Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921

 These micro-rhythms work against the pace of the rest of the film. They are a moment of respite from the rigid geometry of the cityscape. I was first made aware of these micro-rhythms when I paid attention to the smoke spilling out of chimneys, roofs, boats and/or trains in almost every shot. This smoke moves at a dramatically faster pace than any other element within the film, including the camera.

For me, this smoke was the most animated aspect of the city, and the pace of city life – even the hurried walk of the pedestrians – appeared somber in comparison. After I noticed it I could hardly look at anything else. That smoke is spectral, like some strange ghostly presence seeping into the hard geometry of the city.

With its intense energy, this smoke appears as an isolated pocket of movement in an otherwise still image, confusing the distinction between film footage and photograph. I thought this particularly interesting given Strand’s background as a photographer and the fact that particular shots in Manhatta are obvious references to his past photographic work. For me, this conflation of movement and stasis provoked a gentle, yet noticeable, rhythmic disorientation. 

Left: Paul Strand Wall Street 1915            Right: Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921

In relation to Vertov and Ruttmann’s city films, David Campany acknowledges how “the speed of modernity was experienced as a series of switches in tempo and shocks to perceptual habits.”[iii] In a subtle way this is also true of Manhatta. A stylistic anomaly among the city films, it too distills the experience of the modernity through cinematic expression. Watching this film we become acutely aware of the city as a space that overwhelms its anonymous inhabitants but also as a space of overlapping and divergent tempos.

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[i] As Alexander Graf makes remarkably clear by not considering Manhatta within the genre of the city symphony film on the grounds that it, unlike Ruttmann or Vertov’s films, lacks rhythmic or associative connections between individual shots

Graf, Alexander. 2007. Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s. In Avant-Garde Film (ed. A. Graf and D. Scheunemann) 77-91. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi p. 78

[ii] Fitting, then, that the film’s inter-titles are taken from a poem by Walt Whitman.

[iii] Campany, David. 2007. ‘Introduction: When to be Fast, When to be Slow?’. In The Cinematic (ed. D. Campany) 10-17. London: Whitechapel Ventures Ltd. P. 10

Another Eclipse

Just while we are on the topic of spectral figures and the eclipse, I thought it fitting to mention one of the very few photographs taken of Cornell (he was a bit camera shy) that inserts him into this web of association. The photograph is by Duane Michals and shows Cornell in profile standing in front of a mirror. He does not look real, but like a shadow on the verge of disappearing, its form being eaten up by the light encroaching from the left. It is almost as if Cornell himself is being eclipsed.

Where Rose is the sun, in this photograph Cornell is the moon (for he is merely a dark silhouette). Both are intangible and transcendent figures, yet each is the inverse mirror image of the other.

Duane Michals, Joseph Cornell, 1970

Figure as Force in Joseph Cornell's 'Rose Hobart'

The objects enclosed within Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages – the glass jars, marbles, pieces of driftwood and other ‘trinkets’ – are metaphoric souvenirs from the depths of his unconscious. They are transcendent forms, not simply inanimate objects. The same can be said of the silent protagonist in Cornell’s filmic collage Rose Hobart. This woman is no longer the actress Rose Hobart or even Linda Randolf, the character Hobart plays in George Melford’s East of Borneo (the original source of the footage used in Rose Hobart). She is something else entirely, an ungrounded and transient figure.

Cornell’s Rose does not belong to the jungle but to a sort of liminal space. Where the jungle is submerged in darkness she is luminous, a point of light against the murky depths of her surroundings. She floats through the jungle, existing outside of, and apart from, it. Her presence immaterial and intangible – almost ghost-like – and yet she possesses a profound energy and intensity. She is a figure who pulsates as she emits light, a phosphorescent entity.

Thought of in such terms she begins to mirror the image of the sun that Cornell continuously returns to throughout the film. This sun does not have a defined form because it is obscured by clouds. It is indistinct yet luminous and, just like Cornell’s Rose, almost throbs with a palpable vitality as it gives off light. 

This analogy between the woman and the sun, a figure/phantom and a celestial body, reminded me of one of Cornell’s most enigmatic series, his ‘Soap Bubble Sets’. In the first work within the series, called simply Soap Bubble Set, Cornell placed flat glass discs, a white clay pipe, a porcelain doll’s head and an egg in a wineglass in front of an image of the moon. All of these objects are fragile. While the egg hovers precariously in the wine glass, the doll’s head balances on a plinth. A crack is already visible on its small face.

In the presence of these fragile objects the moon’s own fragility becomes apparent. It has become the ‘soap bubble’ of the work’s title, a floating orb that will eventually burst.

The sun in Rose Hobart is characterized in a similar way. It is transient. At the end of the film we witness a solar eclipse that is paired with a shot of a ball falling into water as if the sun were falling out of the sky. In this instant the analogy between Cornell’s Rose, the floating, transient and ghost-like figure, and the sun is complete. The fall of the sun foreshadows Rose’s own fall, the moment when her light is extinguished once the projector is turned off.

Cornell’s Rose is, for me, a dream figure, a flickering light that emerges amid the darkness of sleep. Catherine Corman, among others, talks of the “oneiric logic”[i] that shapes Cornell’s film but somewhat overlooks the significance of his transcendent protagonist, referring to her simply as a “blank slate.”[ii] Cornell’s Rose is not, as I see her, a blank slate but a planet – a soap bubble planet – whose gravitational pull is the force that holds the film together. That is, until the bubble pops and she is once again enveloped in darkness.

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[i] Corman, Catherine. 2010. Surrealist Astronomy in the South Pacific: Joseph Cornell and the Collaged Eclipse. East of Borneo. Viewed 16^th March 2011 http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/13

[ii] Ibid