Manhatta | |
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Directed by | |
Release date |
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Running time | 10 minutes |
Country | United States |
Languages | Silent film English intertitles |
Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film directed by painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand.
Manhatta documents the early 20th-century look of Manhattan. With the city as subject, the film consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with the Staten Island ferry approaching Manhattan and concludes with a sunset view from a skyscraper. Often considered by some to be the first American avant-garde film, [1] its primary objective is to explore the relationship between photography and film. Camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions. [2]
Manhatta was a collaboration between painter/photographer Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The film features intertitles that include excerpts from the writings of Walt Whitman.
In 1995, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". [3] [4] Restoration proved difficult, as the negative was lost, and only a single, heavily damaged 35mm print remained in existence. It was restored for the DVD set Unseen Cinema in October 2005. The film was completely restored in January 2009 by archivist Bruce Posner, in collaboration with film restoration company Lowry Digital. [5] Posner spent close to four years returning the film to its original glory. The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives also commissioned a new score from New York composer Donald Sosin. [6]
Force of Evil is a 1948 American film noir starring John Garfield and Beatrice Pearson and directed by Abraham Polonsky. It was adapted by Polonsky and Ira Wolfert from Wolfert's novel Tucker's People. Polonsky had been a screenwriter for the boxing film Body and Soul (1947), in which Garfield had also played the male lead.
The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra is a 1928 American silent experimental short film co-written and co-directed by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapić. Considered a landmark of American avant-garde cinema, it tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a star; he fails and becomes dehumanized, with studio executives reducing him to the role of an extra and writing the number "9413" on his forehead.
Little Fugitive is a 1953 American independent drama film co-written and co-directed by Raymond Abrashkin, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin, which tells the story of a child alone on Coney Island. It stars Richie Andrusco as the title character, and Richard Brewster as his older brother. The film was screened at 14th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Lion, and nominated for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story, at the 26th Academy Awards.
A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film by American artist Bruce Conner. It combines pieces of found footage taken from various sources such as newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, all set to a score featuring Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome.
Intolerance is a 1916 epic silent film directed by D. W. Griffith. Subtitled as Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages and A Sun-Play of the Ages, the three-and-a-half-hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines, each separated by several centuries: first, a contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption; second, a Judean story: Christ's mission and death; third, a French story: the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572; and fourth, a Babylonian story: the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in 539 BC. Each story had its own distinctive color tint in the original print. The scenes are linked by shots of a figure representing Eternal Motherhood, rocking a cradle.
Film preservation, or film restoration, describes a series of ongoing efforts among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non-profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images they contain. In the widest sense, preservation assures that a movie will continue to exist in as close to its original form as possible.
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
The Dickson Experimental Sound Film is a film made by William Dickson in late 1894 or early 1895. It is the first known film with live-recorded sound and appears to be the first motion picture made for the Kinetophone, the proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Thomas Edison. The film was produced at the "Black Maria", Edison's New Jersey film studio. There is no evidence that it was ever exhibited in its original format.
Empire is a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by."
Charles Sheeler was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the 1921 avant-garde film, Manhatta, which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand. Sheeler is recognized as one of the early adopters of modernism in American art.
Kid Auto Races at Venice is a 1914 American film starring Charles Chaplin. It is the first film in which his "Little Tramp" character makes an appearance before the public. The first film to be produced that featured the character was actually Mabel's Strange Predicament; it was shot a few days before Kid Auto Races but released two days after it; this film, meanwhile, was released only five days after the first film in which Chaplin appeared, Making a Living. Kid Auto Races was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress on December 14, 2020.
H2O (1929) is a short silent film by photographer Ralph Steiner. It is a cinepoem showing water in its many forms.
Rien que les heures is a 1926 experimental silent film by Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti showing the life of Paris through one day in 45 minutes.
Lowry Digital is a digital film restoration company based in Burbank, California. John D. Lowry was a Canadian film restoration expert and innovator who founded Lowry Digital Images in 1988.
The Dragon Painter is a 1919 English language silent romance drama film. It is based on the novel of the same name, written by Mary McNeil Fenollosa. It stars Sessue Hayakawa as a young painter who believes that his fiancée, is a princess who has been captured and turned into a dragon. It was directed by William Worthington and filmed in Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, and in the Japanese Tea Garden in Coronado, California.
The 44th National Society of Film Critics Awards, given on 3 January 2010, honored the best in film for 2009.
Herbert Lee Waters (1902–1997) was an American photographer and filmmaker. Waters was born in Caroleen, North Carolina. He worked as a studio photographer in Lexington, North Carolina. Waters also created over 252 short films that make up a series, Movies of Local People, depicting life in small towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Waters arranged screenings of the short films at local cinemas. They were usually played before the feature film of the screening. Waters made the films profitable for himself through admission prices and contributions from local businesses that wished to appear in the films.
Akeley Motion Picture Camera is a black and white photograph taken by Paul Strand in 1922. It depicts the innovative motion picture camera that the American photographer bought for $2500 and that allowed him to work in the film industry as a cinematographer until 1931, when the camera became obsolete. Strand took several pictures of the camera and this became one of the most famous.