Manhatta (Film Arts Guild, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third film on the TCM “City Symphonies” program, Manhatta (1921), was the most openly literary of them and the only one that contained intertitles. And in case you were wondering how Manhattan lost its final “n” in their title, it’s because its creators, photographer Charles Sheeler and painter Paul Strand (neither of whom had ever made a movie before – and Sheeler never made one again, though Strand went on to become a film director and cinematographer specializing in documentaries), set it to a poem by Walt Whitman with an even more unusual spelling of New York’s famous island, “Mannahatta.” Whitman explains at the beginning of his poem, “I was asking for something as specific and perfect for my city/When lo! upsprang its aboriginal name.” Sheeler and Strand seemed more interested in aesthetic than political or social agendas, and their film is a hauntingly beautiful illustration of lines from Whitman’s poem (which you can read at https://poets.org/poem/mannahatta).

The most striking thing about Manhatta is how little the fundamentals of New York (or any other major city) have changed between the 19th century when Whitman wrote the poem, the immediate aftermath of World War I when Sheeler and Strand made the film, and today. There are taller skyscrapers and bigger crowds in the city (at least there were until the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic took over and sent the city into an extended lockdown it still hasn’t come back from completely). The film is basically a checklist of New York features: skyscrapers, boats in the harbor, the businesses and what Whitman called “the jobbers in the streets,” the throngs of people, the theatres and other amusements, all the things that give a major city life and give it to New York in particular. Manhatta may be more literary (and more literal – it seems as if Sheeler and Strand were essentially using Whitman’s poem as a script and making sure they checked off the box under every feature of New York life Whitman mentioned) than the other two films on the program, but it contains shots that other filmmakers making movies set in New York copied for years. Like the other two films on TCM’s “City Symphonies” program, it’s very much worth seeing even if you wouldn’t want all movies to be like it.