From the New York Times by David Kehr:
“IN 1920 the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler invited his friend Paul Strand, a photographer who, like Sheeler, was a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, to collaborate on a film.
Shot with a French camera that Sheeler had acquired for the staggering sum of $1,600, the 10-minute movie that came to be known as “Manhatta” consisted of a series of strikingly composed images, shot in Lower Manhattan, that evoked a typically epic day in the life of New York. Passengers debark from the Staten Island Ferry, steam billows in great clouds from the peaks of skyscrapers, and workers hurry past the darkened windows of office buildings, while printed titles quote lines from Walt Whitman, celebrating the “proud and passionate city.”
This resolutely modernist work, with its Cubist perspectives and percussive rhythms, most likely was, in the words of the film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, “the first avant-garde film produced in the United States.”
But until very recently “Manhatta” could be seen only in a badly compromised version, with jittery images and a blasted-out contrast that made it look like a fifth-generation photocopy that someone’s dog had been sleeping on for several years. (You can experience the horror for yourself at on YouTube.)
It’s hard to imagine the art world allowing a similar fate to befall a painting by Sheeler or a photograph by Strand. “There is a misconception about film,” said Josh Siegel, an associate curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s film department, “that because it’s a mass-produced medium that all of these films are easily accessible and easily reproduced, and of course they’re not.”
In 2006 MoMA joined a consortium of film archives to sponsor a digital restoration of “Manhatta,” supervised by the independent curator Bruce Posner.”
Unrestored version.
