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• 1 media/Koyaanisqatsi-NYC.jpg media/Koyaanisqatsi-NYC.jpg term 2016-01-05T20:04:50-08:00 The City Symphony 26 Organism (Hilary Harris, 1975, 19m)
  Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983, 85m) image_header 212352 2024-03-20T00:17:19-07:00 January 5, 2016 Organism  was made by time-lapse pioneer Hilary Harris, juxtaposing scientific cellular biology with the patterns of urban activity seen, often shot from above, providing exuberant time-lapse video of New York City shot over fifteen years. Koyaanisqatsi, with a haunting operatic soundtrack composed by Philip Glass, extends the city symphony form to a global dimension, building upon Harris’ techniques of time manipulation and aerial perspectives to deliver a meditative critique of the role of human civilization in this mesmerizing vision of  “life out of balance.”

  
  Program Notes

  This series  on “The Urban Landscape” presents a number of approaches to the question of what constitutes a “landscape film" along with the question of what constitutes an urban landscape. Appropriately enough, we begin with the City Symphony—a genre in which the city landscape is the subject and not simply a backdrop. Traditionally, film scholars have defined the city symphony as a silent experimental film genre that flourished during the late 1920s and early 1930s, presenting a visual analogy to music and structured as a “day in the life” of a particular city.  

  This opening night of “The Urban Landscape” series presents two examples of more recent city symphonies. In these examples, the city symphony expresses changing attitudes about urbanization. The experimental short Organism (1975) is a small revelation—mesmerizing and wonderfully reflective of the aesthetics of its historical moment of the mid 1970s, when New York City was still a magnet for artists despite its widespread economic and social despair and disrepair.  Hilary Harris was a pioneer of time-lapse cinematography of the city. In Organism, Harris likens New York City to a biological organism, interweaving microscopic footage of human cells with macroscopic views of the city seen from great heights. The film presents a holistic, ecological view of the city as a living entity informed by a burgeoning computerization aided by an electronic score to suggest a view of the life of the city as a teeming organism of interconnected molecules continuously circulating, day and night.

  As one of the most famous and commercially successful non-verbal, musical landscape films of all time, Koyaanisqatsi pushed the geographic as well as operatic aspects of city symphony to a meditation on urbanization at the national scale. Yet, despite its differences in both scale and breadth with Organism, Koyaanisqatsi is equally concerned with the increasingly rapid processes of mechanization and homogenization. Reggio's film is also utterly of its time - in the early 1980s Reagan-era, in which the scale and inclinations of a totalizing economic and cultural hegemony was taking hold. While Harris’ birds-eye views were afforded by the tall skyscrapers of the city, Reggio's film provides a “God’s eye”  airplane pilots’ views of, suggesting not just a whole city, but a whole country now caught up in the frenetic tempo global capitalism and trade.  With Philip Glass’ hauntingly, mesmerizing score, Koyaanisqatsi is a ghostly critique of the hyper-modern, hyper-mechanized, industrialization reverberating with innuendo, suggesting words sung by invisible people who have been pushed aside, marginalized and disappeared. 

  While the City Symphony film presents a mirror of city life, it is not a mirror of individual likenesses— but a representation of a zeitgeist, of time as a collective experience, in which the narrative is defined as the journey of the sun over the urban landscape.

• 1 media/Koyaanisqatsi-NYC.jpg 2016-01-05T20:20:22-08:00 City Symphony mediography 14 plain 2016-05-04T11:43:01-07:00
  • Manhatta, 1921, Paul Strand & Charles Sheeler, 11 min - Walt Whitman celebratory song
  • Rien que les heures, 1926, Alberto Cavalcanti, 46 min -“epitomizes the poverty, cynical realism & aesthetic freedom of France of 1920s” (MacDonald, 153)
  • Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927, Walter Ruttman - “reflects Germany’s postwar hunger for social order” (153) idea of “symphony” as ideal of European thinking & cultural evolution - coherent performance within which     the individualities of contributions are subsumed (MacDonald, 152
  • Études sur Paris, 1928, André Sauvage - silent movie travels from the outskirts of Paris to the Seine in the centre of the city, going along the Canal de l'Ourcq, showing human activity as it was happening in 1928, in particular the industrious 19th district.
  • The Bridge (De Brug) 1927-8, Joris Ivens - an abstract study of a massive iron bridge in Rotterdam, with its stark black & white montages and fluid camera, was described in the British journal Closeup (1928) as a 'pure visual symphony'.
  • Man With a Movie Camera, 1929, Dziga Vertov -“reflects new communist Russia’s excitement about the Revolution & advent of modern industrialization” (MacDonald, 153)  > shot in 3 Ukrainian cities: Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev
  • Rain (Regen), 1929, Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken. "A day in the life of a rain-shower in Amsterdam.  
  • Skyscraper Symphony, 1929, Robert Florey, 9 min. - montage of the skyscrapers of Manhattan opens with a succession of stationary views of the upper portions of numerous buildings. This is followed by a wide variety of fluid shots, which also begin to show more and more of the surrounding city, in addition to the skyscrapers themselves. 
  • A propos de Nice, 1930, Jean Vigo - photographed by Boris Kaufman. "The film depicts life in Nice, France by documenting the people in the city, their daily routines, a carnival and social inequalities. Vigo described the film in an address to the Groupement des Spectateurs d'Avant-Garde: "In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." “Vigo offers a restructured perception of the world - not so much through a seamless, logical narrative, but rather a fast-paced collection of only tangentially related shots
  • Bronx Morning, 1931, Jay Leyda - an experimental reworking of continental developments through American vernacular, infusing avant-guard with reality and the capacity for social criticism (MacDonald, 153) - pro-immigrant
  • The City, 1939, Willard Van Dyke & Ralph Steiner, 43min - produced for American Institute of Planners for 1939 New York World’s Fair - problems of the city solved by American planned communities => celebrating suburbs
  • Up and Down the Waterfront, 1946, Rudy Burckhard
  • The Climate of New York, 1948, Rudy Burckhardt
  • Under the Brooklyn Bridge, 1953, Rudy Burckhardt
  • Jazz of Lights, 1954, Ian Hugo
  • Ave. El, 1954, Carson Davidson (experimental)
  • The Wonder Ring, 1955 - Stan Brakhage - commissioned by Joseph Cornell - parallel journey
  • The Red Balloon, 1956, Albert Lamorisse
  • NY, NY, 1957, Francis Thompson, 15min 25sec— wacky, wavy vision
  • Weegee’s New York, 1952/55 - directed by Weegee (Arthur Fellig) & compiled by Amos Vogel (no longer exists?)
  • Bridges-Go-Round, 1958, Shirley Clarke
  • Empire, 1963, Andy Warhol, 8 hrs  (JG also includes Wavelength, 1967 -Michael Snow —not so sure)
  • Go, Go, Go!, 1964, Marie Menken, 11min., silent - use of time lapse for nearly whole film - effect of miniaturizing big events, normally awesome aspects of city life, likely inspired Jonas Mekas  (MacDonald, 166-7)
  • Jonas Mekas -  Lost, Lost, Lost ?
  • Organism, 1975, Hilary Harris
  • NYC, 1976, Jeff Scher - animation
  • Koyaanisqatsi, 1982, Godfrey Reggio - the nation as city
  • Berlin/NY, 1984, Jack Waters
  • The Making of Do The Right Thing, 1989, St. Clair Bourne, 60 min (MacDonald, 154)
  • Elegy in the Streets, 1989, Jim Hubbard
  • Side/Walk/Shuttle,1992, Ernie Gehr, 41 min
  • Undercurrents, 1994, John Behrens, 8min
  • The Movement of Light at Night, 1996, John Behrens, 6min
  • B/Side, 1996, Abigail Child - Thompkins Square park, homelessness
  • Fulton Fish Market, 2003, Mark Street
  • Native New Yorker, 2005, Steve Bilich - immigration (pair w/ Bronx Morning?)
  • NYC Weights and Measures, 2006, Jem Cohen
  • Empire II, 2008, Amos Poe
  • Gravity Hill Newsreels - Occupy Wall Street, 2011, Jem Cohen
  • London Symphony, work-in-progress, Alex Barrett, http://www.londonsymphfilm.com/
  
  Interactive City Symphony:
  • Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, 2007-present: http://dziga.perrybard.net/
  Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and upload them to this site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. Anyone can upload footage. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.  This website contains every shot in Vertov’s 1929 film along with thumbnails representing the beginning middle and end of each shot. You are invited to interpret Vertov and upload your footage to this site to become part of the database. You can contribute an entire scene or a shot or multiple shots from different scenes.