| N.Y., N.Y. | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Francis Thompson |
| Music by | Gene Forrell |
| Distributed by | Anagram International |
Running time | 15 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
N.Y., N.Y. (subtitled A Day in New York) is a 1957 film by director Francis Thompson. [1] [2] [3]
Eight years in the making, it is a collection of scenes from New York City recorded through special lenses, prisms and mirrors giving it a Cubist-Dadaist look. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Thompson shot the images with a Kodak Cine-Special. [2] The film's original negatives sat under the director's bed for nearly thirty years. [2]
N.Y., N.Y. is mentioned in Aldous Huxley's essay Heaven and Hell :
And then there is what may be called the Distorted Documentary a new form of visionary art, admirably exemplified by Mr. Francis Thompson's film, NY, NY. In this very strange and beautiful picture we see the city of New York as it appears when photographed through multiplying prisms, or reflected in the backs of spoons, polished hub caps, spherical and parabolic mirrors. We still recognize houses, people, shop fronts, taxicabs, but recognize them as elements in one of those living geometries which are so characteristic of the visionary experience. The invention of this new cinematographic art seems to presage (thank heaven!) the supersession and early demise of non-representational painting. It used to be said by the non-representationalists that colored photography had reduced the old-fashioned portrait and the old-fashioned landscape to the rank of otiose absurdities. This, of course, is completely untrue. Colored photography merely records and preserves, in an easily reproducible form, the raw materials with which portraitists and landscape painters work. Used as Mr. Thompson has used it, colored cinematography does much more than merely record and preserve the raw materials of non-representational art; it actually turns out the finished product. Looking at NY, NY, I was amazed to see that virtually every pictorial device invented by the old masters of non-representational art and reproduced ad nauseam by the academicians and mannerists of the school, for the last forty years or more, makes its appearance, alive, glowing, intensely significant, in the sequences of Mr. Thompson's film. [9]
It also received praise from The New York Times as 'one of the few genuine masterpieces' of the burgeoning experimental film movement in the United States. [2]
Two years later, it won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. [10]
Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty (1970).
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Michael Benson is an American author, artist, filmmaker, and exhibitions producer whose most recent work centers on the convergence of art and science. In the last fifteen years Benson has produced a series of large-scale exhibitions of digitally constructed planetary landscapes in major international museums. His most recent book, Space Odyssey, is a detailed nonfiction examination of the production of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book's publication was timed to coicide with the 50th anniversary of the film's theatrical release. Benson has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. He is currently using scanning electron microscope technologies at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa to view and photograph natural objects for a book and exhibition project titled Nanocosmos. He is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities, a Weizmann Institute Advocate for Curiosity, and was recently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab.
White Mountain art is the body of work created during the 19th century by over four hundred artists who painted landscape scenes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire in order to promote the region and, consequently, sell their works of art.
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Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
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Abstract photography, sometimes called non-objective, experimental or conceptual photography, is a means of depicting a visual image that does not have an immediate association with the object world and that has been created through the use of photographic equipment, processes or materials. An abstract photograph may isolate a fragment of a natural scene to remove its inherent context from the viewer, it may be purposely staged to create a seemingly unreal appearance from real objects, or it may involve the use of color, light, shadow, texture, shape and/or form to convey a feeling, sensation or impression. The image may be produced using traditional photographic equipment like a camera, darkroom or computer, or it may be created without using a camera by directly manipulating film, paper or other photographic media, including digital presentations.
E. Francis Thompson was an American director, producer, and writer known for his multi-screen and giant-screen filmography.
