Skyline of Manhattan - The Hoffmannesque City

(click here for the Romanian version)

I remember the first time I saw Manhattan's skyline: I was coming from Boston with the Greyhound. The skyscrapers appeared suddenly: it was like a huge stone forest; it was more than that: the absolute forest. The feeling was brutal: the uniqueness of New York; no possible reference; the city could be defined only by itself. Even to say that it was the total Metropolis would have been inappropriate. It was New York, period.

I was traveling by Amtrak two weeks ago, from DC to Boston. Soon after the train left the Penn Station in New York, we had the view of Manhattan's skyline. The view lasts for about five minutes, as the train is running slowly on the elevated rail trackage, over Brooklyn and Queens. No more brutal feeling, I know now the city, the view of the skyscrapers became familiar to me.

I tried several shots. It was in the afternoon. A storm was approaching, the sky was grey, there was a kind of dark hallo in the air. I knew that my photos would be somehow sullen, but I was very enthusiast and I tried to record also a video. Here is what I got:




Actually I liked the dark hallo of the air, as I was thinking of one of the most amazing short movies that I had seen ever: Panorama from the Tower of Brooklyn Bridge.

It was filmed in one day, April 18, 1899, for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company; the official birthdate of the movie was much later, September 12, 1903, when the proprietary company released it.

A movie of only 38 seconds: the view was taken from the tower on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. As the film begins, the camera is looking southwest, towards the southern tip of Manhattan (the Battery). The camera pans very rapidly north following Manhattan's East River shoreline, across the bridge span itself and the bridge's New York side tower, following the shoreline further north towards Corlear's Hook, where the film ends. Some visible landmarks include the Fulton Fish Market buildings at Fulton and South Streets (currently the site of the South Street Seaport Museum); north of the bridge tower is the Catherine Slip, where a Catherine Street Ferry is docked (the summary as it was prepared by the researchers from the Library of Congress).

The author was one of the greatest cinematographers of all times, Billy Bitzer. He is famous for what he achieved in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, but you should see also his short movies from the first years of the twentieth century. It's a huge treasure of jewels.

Here you can watch the movie (the original version is at the Library of Congress):



The pelicula is a bit decayed, only this is fortunate: the blurred image creates a genuinely Avant-Garde effect. It's a gem.

And I was dreaming to achieve that blur in my photos and videos!

A couple of days after I was traveling back from Boston. It was now late, towards evening. I tried again some shots and a new video. The city was looking again dreadful with endless nuances of darkness among weird clouds playing with the stone forest of skyscrapers: the natural site for fantastic stories imagined by someone like E.T.A. Hoffmann.






(New York, New York)

(Early Movies)