Abstract

Abstract The article analyses the cinematic imaginaries of motion, mobility and skyline views in Manhatta (Sheeler and Strand, 1921). While the film has been extensively discussed in the literature, its linkages with contemporaneous understandings of the urban have not been sufficiently developed. This article examines reflexivity and disembedding as processes of modernity in relationship to Manhatta, and establishes the skyline trope as the critical visual detail in the 1920s cinematic city cinema. It then explores the way in which Manhatta conveys the transience of urban experience and the fragility of urbanity endangered in particular by economic forces. This discussion further evokes the fragmentation of the new urban experiences and establishes cinematography as a bridge between the city and the nature, present too in Whitman’s poetry. Yet Manhatta succumbs to organic views of the city typical of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology, screening out of view political divisions, social stratification and urban change, and viewing urban problems as inherent to the processes of urbanization. Through a dialectical interlinkage between the city imagined and the city experienced, Manhatta presents the city as a site of strangeness that cannot be easily fathomed, one whose contradictions cannot be resolved. Silhouettes of workers prompt questions about the role of working classes, suggesting a pessimistic view of their power set against the landscape of a capitalist metropolis always in the process of motion, of being re-created. This strangeness and the difficulty of defining and understanding the elusive subject of the modern city – a trope discernable in Manhatta and also in film noir – is noted as well in the writings of Simmel, Mumford and the Chicago School of Urban Ecology.

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