A Day in New York: Futurist Vision and Francis Thompsons’s N.Y., N.Y.
Art & Trash, episode 15
A Day in New York: Futurist Vision and Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y.
Stephen Broomer, June 2, 2022
For Bruce Posner
As a maker of sponsored films, Francis Thompson was an efficient and technically disciplined filmmaker. But the film for which he is best remembered, N.Y., N.Y., 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—N.Y., N.Y. 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.
N.Y., N.Y. was issued on blu-ray disc by Flicker Alley in 2015, on their release Masterworks of American Experimental Film, 1920-1970. It is presently available via mail-order from Flicker Alley.
SCRIPT:
“These are the forms the city could have taken, if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
This episode is dedicated to Bruce Posner, filmmaker, historian, preservationist, a hero of mine I’m lucky enough to also call a friend, whose tremendous efforts on behalf of experimental film are reflected in, among other things, his Unseen Cinema catalogue/exhibition/home video release, and more recently, his Masterworks of the American Avant-Garde Experimental Film collection. It’s difficult for me to even imagine addressing Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957) without the context of its preservation. Posner befriended Thompson in New York in the 1990s; one day Thompson revealed that the film was sitting under his bed, the original A/B/C Kodachrome rolls. Posner subsequently restored the film to the state in which it’s presented in the Masterworks set. In its initial circulation, Thompson’s film had been seen widely and admired; a still of it decorates the cover of Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Cinema and Aldous Huxley wrote of the film as an essential work of ‘distorted documentary’. These details make its eventual disappearance and Posner’s resurrection of it all the more significant.
It’s owing to Renan’s book that I first encountered the film (in concept, with hints of its aesthetics), but it’s thanks to Posner’s efforts that my generation was able to know it.
Francis Thompson used specially-machined lenses and other unconventional tools and techniques to make N.Y., N.Y., an elastic reimagining of New York City. A Day in New York deals with the structure of the film—this ‘waking of the world’—and the suggestions gleaned from its mysterious abstractions. With this video essay I have tried to explore the consistency of composition in Thompson’s work via the visual aspect. Rather than serve as illustration or counterpoint, the picture component uses superimpositions to demonstrate parallels of action and composition that course through Thompson’s film. As an act of visual argumentation, it is not explicitly described in the narration, which has its own pursuits. (An example, in the figure below, shows the rhythms of a bird’s-eye view of a crosswalk crossed with those of a prismatic lens passed over a steel bridge).
Another act of subtle visual argumentation in this piece is in my integration of Thompson’s sponsored films—Time is Life (1949), Fears of Children (1951) and To the Fair (1964)—in which can be seen forms and patterns that resonate with those he discovers in the New York cityscape—cancerous tissue in a petri dish, the sculptural curves of a modernist pavilion, a turtle crawling along hexagonal tiles.
But the piece is primarily devoted to the exploration of Thompson’s vision of New York as a kind of utopian fantasy, where the speed of life and the sublime confrontation with the crowd, the skyscraper, the subway, is a celebration not only of the city’s present but a speculative promise of its future. I claim no special knowledge of Thompson’s lenses, which remain mysterious, but their effects are by turns prismatic, anamorphic, and splintering. Between the celebratory, ecstatic spirit of the work and these effects, N.Y., N.Y. strongly recalls the city symphonies and the aesthetics pursued by the modern movements of the early twentieth century. This video essay visualizes parallels between these works as precedents for Thompson’s film. A tour of the city symphonies reveals an emerging agreement between the forms of early film editing and the visual abstractions practiced by Dadaists, Cubists, Futurists, Constructivists…and details in paintings by Cubist painter Robert Delaunay and Futurist painter Joseph Stella reveal ready parallels to Thompson’s work. The Dadaist film Ballet Mécanique is a clear precedent for Thompson’s film, a machined vision of life that is ecstatic, repetitious, chaotic, full of promises of violence.
The subtitle of this piece bears a claim to Futurist vision. This is not, in my view, a forgoing of other possible influences or meanings in the film, but a declaration of the shared themes between N.Y., N.Y. and the work of the Futurists, their preoccupations with the crowded, violent overtures of vision in the modern industrial city. The Futurist city, as imagined in the paintings of Umberto Boccioni (such as Visioni Simultanee or The City Rises, both 1912), is never mere abstraction, but a seer anticipating the elaboration of an existing dynamic. Thompson sees in the New York cityscape serial repetitions, mechanization, and scale that is fated to follow that same intensity to its conclusion. That the New York City of 2022 no more resembles N.Y., N.Y. than the Milan of 2022 resembles The City Rises is of little consequence; the shared goal of this work is that lowercase futurism that is twinned to optimism and that marks mid-century attitudes towards science and technology.