| Summary: | PICTURING A METROPOLIS is part of the film retrospective UNSEEN CINEMA that explores long-forgotten American experimental cinema. Artists/photographers Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand created one of the earliest achievements of 20th century film modernism. This expressive film resonates a grand passion for New York City and visualizes selected passages of Walt Whitman's poetic text. --BRUCE POSNER Strand and Sheeler's only film collaboration was the first consciously produced avant-garde U.S. film and a model for subsequent "city films, though it was released as a New York "scenic" of lower Manhattan. A modernist work, the film demonstrates a romantic subtext in its Whitmanesque inter-titles and narrative construction. -- JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK Born into wealth, Charles Sheeler became an artist in the 1910s, creating "Precisionist" paintings that looked like photographs and sharply realist photographs that won numerous prizes. Apart from several attempts at filmmaking, Manhatta was his only film work, but his oil painting "Church Street El' "(1920) among other paintings and photographs are renditions from the film. --JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK. One of America's most famous art photographers, Paul Strand's career spanned 60 years.
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