TALES OF LOHR: "NY, NY"

Francis Thompson's fractured "Day In New York"

The documentary subgenre known as the city symphony, which reached its apotheosis in the first half and middle years of the 20th century, found filmmakers using cinematography, editing, and music to evoke the architectural, logistical, and emotional realities of life in the major metropolitan spaces of the globe. Pioneered by the earliest practitioners of “actuality” filmmaking, the form progressed from its nascent “plunk down the camera and take it in” documentary objectivity to films that twisted, bent, and exploded the buildings, landmarks, and people of the cityscapes they explored, attempting to capture nothing less than the intangible essence of the city-dwelling mindset. Among the most highly regarded exemplars of the city symphony form are Rien que les heures (Nothing But the Hours) (1926), a vibrant look at Paris through the eyes of peripatetic Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti, here making his debut; Walter Ruttmann’s in-retrospect unbearably bittersweet Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, made the following year; and, perhaps most famously, Dziga Vertov’s acrobatically innovative Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a film that transmogrifies the Soviet cities it excavates as thoroughly as it does the filmmaking form itself, in the process earning itself an essentially permanent berth on lists of the greatest motion pictures ever made.