...As a maker of sponsored films, Francis Thompson was an efficient and technically disciplined filmmaker. But the film for which he is best remembered, New York New York, was a work of passion and deliberation that he would spend eight years completing. Beyond all of its dazzling imagery—formed by prisms, special lenses, and distorting mirrored surfaces—New York New York was a declaration of urban vision truer to the soul than to the eyes. Thompson would later joke that he wanted to “make fun of the ridiculousness of the life of a New Yorker,” but the film is less about a day in the life of a New Yorker than a day in the life of Manhattan itself, an island-as-an-ant-colony coursing with faint glimpses of life but defined by infrastructure. Thompson’s distorting imagery allows Manhattan to tear away from the earth, its skyscrapers and high-rises and bridges suspended like clouds in the sky. His is less a portrait of the futility and absurdity of urban life than a reimagining of the cityscape that transcends stone and steel, the dream-life of buildings.
Thompson’s photography lends serial and symmetrical form to the sights he encounters in the city. This is a mechanical civilization, of tubes and gears and cranks, Manhattan as a massive watch. Thompson’s New York seems to exist largely independent of human presence; it offers the city as a dynamic machine where light courses across steel to form distinctive patterns; where the subject’s movements create undulating rhythms that Thompson can then enhance and stagger in editing; where kaleidoscopic photography of girders and glass can suggest the perfect form of a bellows, or a sublime echo.New York experiences a waking-of-the-world—a figure stirs in bed, breakfasts are eaten, commutes begin. The bustle of midday mid-century New York street life is perceived through the refracting planes of Thompson’s distorted lenses. The film becomes an exercise in counterpoint: the fractured composition plane holds its own rhythms and counter-rhythms. The collective force of civilization remains on the periphery, as when strange characters—calligraphic textile patterns—are typed in a melodious rhythm to suggest the workday, or when the camera lingers on scenes of construction, the eternal perpetuation of the city. When its sights aren’t bent along the rigid symmetries and perfect rhythms of the kaleidoscope, the city is transformed through anamorphosis, stretched, wrapped through itself like ribbons in the sky. Thompson uses reflections to eliminate the earth itself, with skyscrapers suspended like clouds. Human movement and camera movement become akin to the coursing rhythms of molecules and bacteria found in the petri dishes of scientific films.
Like many films that begin with a waking of the world, New York New York passes sunset and the end of the work day to find a nocturne. This nocturne settles in only to be interrupted with a dazzling glow, the neon lifeblood of the city, the blending lights and bending horns of a jazz ensemble, a second wake. That the city remains visible, even when bent into unfamiliar shapes, is a testament to Thompson’s representational bias, that even through this distortion, the subject is resilient, recognizable as piano keys, the marquees and lights of Broadway, a lone dancer who is multiplied to form a chorus line.
New York New York follows in the tradition of city symphony films, a short-lived, celebratory, informal genre that gained traction in the late silent era. The city symphonies were associated with symphonic music, both in the degree to which they expressed recurring themes, distinctive movements, an interplay of formal elements bearing the structures of a symphony, and in the formal grandeur of the symphony that it assumes in its consonant parts and harmonious shape. Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a City, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Joris Ivens’s Rain, and Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta have all been grouped under the banner of the city symphony film. The city was an ideal subject for artists working parallel to the formal reimagining of urbanism in the modern movements of early twentieth century painting: for Cubists and Futurists, the modern city was a new vision, the truth of which might be discovered through violent defamiliarization. For both these movements and the city symphony filmmakers, urban life was a dense puzzle, teeming with scenes of labour, recreation, triumphant new architecture, prime for the search for new myths. Thompson’s film, coming decades later, inherits and renews these themes. Thompson had an overt debt to the distorting visions of the Cubists and Futurists, and to the prismatic cinematography of the Dadaist film Ballet mécanique, a film built around a splintering of vision that challenges conventional perspective, that defamiliarizes, a form that mirrors the repetitions, strange spaces, declarations and promises of violence that inhabit the film.
New York, New York invites similarities to analytical Cubism. George Braque’s Factories at Rio-Tinto at L’Estaque and Robert Delauney’s Eiffel Tower exemplify the multi-planar compositions of analytical Cubism: it is as if the image was assembled from a collision of perspectives and angles. Francis Thompson’s lenses bear multiple, simultaneous perspectives; his images engage forms that echo, but even that description sells short the variety of image-making tricks that Thompson employs, many of which create trailing visual echoes and reflections, but some of which bend forms and, by the shape of the reflective surface, twist the subjects in unpredictable, diverse ways.
The Italian Futurists were distinct in their fiery embrace of the speed and density of the modern city. Is New York, New York a Futurist work? Thompson portrays city life much as the Italian Futurists did a half century earlier, as a tangled cloud of glass and metal, a dynamic blend of human bodies, technology and speed; its blending and bending of urban and human elements recalls Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House, where from a balcony overlooking a plaza, surrounding buildings bend in unnatural accord as a cacophony of forms strain upward from the ground. The Italian-American Futurist Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights paintings were nearer to Thompson’s subject geographically, imagining Coney Island as a harmonious riot of curving forms suggestive of the fairgrounds. That Thompson was indebted to the techniques of the Italian Futurists is as certain as his debts to the Cubists. With New York, New York, Thompson employs lenses and reflections as an arsenal to defy the realist painter’s entrenched knowledge of perspective.
New York, New York also suggests in its illusions the city of the future, a city not unlike those imagined by Italo Calvino in his novel Invisible Cities. A city in miniature, a dream of a possible city. In Calvino’s novel, Marco Polo offers Kulba Khan this explanation for one of his strange reports: “these are the forms the city could have taken, if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.” Within New York New York, there are images that have been taken to suggest, contrary to the Futurists, that mechanization is a harbinger of futility, that a modern vision of progress is anything but progress; the same could be taken from Thompson’s remark about the ridiculousness of the life of a New Yorker. But then, the form expands on his remarks, that ‘ridiculousness’ is not absurdity but an ecstatic crowding. Automation comes twinned to wonder, and apprehension turns to admiration for the great machine of Manhattan, its numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies. In Thompson’s lens, that heavenward stretch is to the glory of modern vision.
