Skyscraper Symphony
About Skyscraper Symphony
The short is a montage of Manhattan skyscrapers filmed from low angles. The opening and closing shots are mostly still, one fading into the next. In the middle the cuts come faster, and the camera tips and shakes as it climbs the facades. More of the street appears as the views widen.
Cast & crew
More about Skyscraper Symphony
Robert Florey shot it on three early mornings in mid-1929 with a handheld 35mm DeVry, while he was directing at Paramount's Astoria studio. Scott Simmon notes that those mornings overlapped the period when Florey was also directing the Marx Brothers in The Cocoanuts. The negative he left with an art-cinema distributor was lost within a year.
Themes
Background
City-symphony films were already a small genre: Manhatta in 1921 in the United States, and Walther Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City in 1927, which Simmon calls the import that mattered most.
In film history
Simmon places the short with the Little Cinema movement, which faded once the Depression and sound features closed many of those houses.
Making
Florey made experimental shorts on the side of studio assignments. This one came from looking at Manhattan at dawn after nights of shooting at Astoria, where sound production was running around the clock.
Reviews
Scott Simmon's note for the National Film Preservation Foundation calls it Florey's montage of Manhattan architecture and sets it beside Manhatta and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Amy Murphy reviewed the anthology that includes it in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 4 (December 2016).
Look
Florey hand-held a 35mm DeVry for three dawns. Static low angles and slow fades bookend a middle section of fast, canted, shaky views up the buildings.
Technique
The DeVry was light enough to tilt by hand from the street, which is how the middle section gets its canted frames.
Preservation
The original negative was lost within a year of production. An Austrian print found at Gosfilmofond was repatriated by George Eastman House and preserved in 2001 through Saving the Silents. The National Film Preservation Foundation circulates a clip from that 35mm preservation.
Notes
- Florey was born in Paris in 1900 and came to the United States in 1921 as a newspaper correspondent.
- He had already shown The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra in 1927.
- Little Cinema programs of the late 1920s paired shorts like this with European features.
- An Austrian release print turned up in the 1990s at Gosfilmofond in Moscow.
- George Eastman House repatriated it and preserved it in 2001 under Saving the Silents. The NFPF transfer is from that 35mm print at 24 frames per second.
- Musicologist Hannah Lewis has compared the tipped angles and unsteady moves with Soviet montage.
Scenes
- Still views of the upper floors dissolve from one tower to the next.
- The camera jerks and tilts through a run of fast cuts in the middle of the reel.
- Later shots pull back far enough to show the streets around the buildings.
Influenced by
- Manhatta (1921)
- Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Skyscraper Symphony (1929).webm)
- National Film Preservation Foundation clip (Skyscraper Symphony, 1929)
