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