I'll Take Manhatta

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:15:00 GMT

You could be forgiven for never having heard of Manhatta. Filmed in 1920 on one of the most expensive movie cameras available at the time, it gained quite a reputation for its herky-jerky rhythms, Cubist sensibilities, and uniquely artistic view of the areas of Lower Manhattan it depicted; it was later described as the first American avante-garde film. But it soon fell out of print, and even dedicated cinephiles rarely saw it for decades. It became one of the many early films that it was far easier to talk about than to see.

A recent article by Dave Kehr in the New York Times about a new digital restoration of Manhatta is well worth a look, though, even if you aren't particultuar interested in the movie itself. It sheds a fascinating light on various aspects of film restoration, from the economics of the process to the social politics of why it becomes necessary. In the case of Manhatta, the main print of the film that was circulated for decades was horridly bleached out, poorly timed, and of awful quality (it can be seen on YouTube here, in a print described by Kehr as looking like "a fifth-generation photocopy that someone's dog had been sleeping on for several years"). Kehr notes that there it's unlikely that a photograph by Paul Strand or a painting by Charles Sheeler, the two men behind Manhatta, would be allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair. He quotes Josh Siegel, a curator at MoMA, as saying "There is a misconception about film that because it's a mass-produced medium, that all these films are easily accessible and easily reproduced. And of course, they're not."

The story of Manhatta's glorious restoration, using digital technologies that have only recently become available and are still extremely costly to museums and archivists without access to Hollywood money, is a compelling one. The technologies highlighted are often proprietary and expensive, and the movie's journey from a dusty, cracking print to what Kehr describe as a movie with "the grain and clarity of a platinum photographic print come to life" is an interesting one. In the story's crowning irony, Bruce Posner, the curator of the project, describes the thrill he got at seeing the movie digitally restored on a computer -- only to see, once it had been transfered back to film, a few telltale new specks of dirt on the print. It's a terrific look into an aspect of moviemaking that's rarely written about.

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The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Though we love movie-related lists as much as anybody -- indeed, as we love movie-related lists even more than anybody -- we've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in the recent flood-tide of best-ofs: the documentary often gets the short shrift. Stuck somewhere between a feature film and an educational short, even with the new wave of populist docs that actually make money at the box office, doumentaries are rarely considered part of the mainstream corpus which gets shuffled around for various critics' Top Whatever lists, and thus, leave the average fan with no idea where to start when it comes to the medium.

That's something that Jonathan Kahana, a professor of cinema studies at NYU (and author of the recently released Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary) aims to change with this list.

Originally created as a feature for an in-flight magazine and later severely truncated (a process all to familiar to those of us who have tilled that particular soil), Kahana's list contains a dozen of the finest documentaries in history from the 1920s to the present, available on DVD and otherwise. Compiled by the author to "pay it forward" to an upcoming generations of documentary fans, the list is a solid one -- we'll present it below in chronological order, but please do check out the link for Kahana's insightful commentary on each choice.

1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, 1921) & Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929)
2. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
3. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. Salesman (Alfred & David Maysles, 1969)
6. Harlan County U.S.A. & American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1975 & 1991)
7. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1982)
8. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989)
9. Little Dieter Wants to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998)
10. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003)
12. Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2004)

What do you think, Screengrab readers? What did Kahana include that you'd have left off, and what did he omit that you'd make sure got in? What are your 12 favorite documentaries?

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I'll Take Manhatta

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