FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Anthology Film Archives
Contact: Robert Haller, Director Collections
Tel. 212 505-5181 x 12 Fax. 212 477-2714
Robert Haller <dev@anthologyfilmarchives.org
“PICTURING A METROPOLIS: NEW YORK CITY UNVEILED”
DVD Single and Box Set Release
“Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941”
July 20, 2005–– “PICTURING A METROPOLIS: New York City Unveiled” will be nationally released on
DVD by Image Entertainment on October 18, 2005. “PICTURING A METROPOLIS” will be available as
a single DVD and as part of the 7-DVD, 155-film, 20-hour box set, “Unseen Cinema: Early American
Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941.”
The 26 short films selected by Bruce Posner and David Shepard lovingly depict scenes of New Yorkers
among the skyscrapers, streets, and night life of Manhattan during a half century of progress, while at
the same time showing changes in film style and the history of cinema experiments. Since the
beginning of cinema, filmmakers have been infatuated with dynamic images of New York City including
turn of the century actualities, ciné-poems, commercial and radical newsreels, travelogues, and
Hollywood musicals.
“PICTURING A METROPOLIS” features Robert Flaherty's Twenty-Four-Dollar Island (1926), until now
a lost work from the pioneer documentary director of Nanook of the North. The film celebrates the
monumental skyscrapers of America’s greatest city. Flaherty's film was restored from pristine film
elements discovered in Russia and The Netherlands.
The British Film Institute, London, provided the only known original of the landmark American film,
Manhatta (1921), photographed by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler and inspired by Walt Whitman’s
poetry. Skyscrapers and skylines are also the subject of Skyscraper Symphony (1929) by Robert
Florey, Autumn Fire (1933) by Herman Weinberg, and Pursuit of Happiness (1941) by Rudy
Burckhardt.
Earlier views of New York’s developing landscape are explored in The Blizzard, The Beginning of a
Skyscraper, Panorama from theTower of the Brooklyn Bridge, and fourteen other films, some
photographed more than a century ago between 1899 to 1905.
A sense of place distinctly New York is captured in ciné-poems, Manhattan Medley (1931) by Bonney
Powell, A Bronx Morning (1931) by Jay Leyda, and Footnote to Fact (1933) by Lewis Jacobs. The
Manhattan night life is rhapsodized by jazz singer Wini Shaw in Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic
“Lullaby of Broadway,” from Gold Diggers of 1935.
Anthology Film Archives, the New York-based film museum exclusively devoted to avant-garde
cinema, organized PICTURING A METROPOLIS to accompany “Unseen Cinema: Early American
Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941,” the largest touring film program in film history. The PICTURING A
METROPOLIS DVD has been carefully revised and digitally mastered with new music tracks by Film
Preservation Associates.
“The incredible images of New York in this fascinating DVD provide some of the earliest motion
pictures,” says Ann Turner, vice president and general manager of Kodak’s Entertainment Imaging
Division. “They evoke a sense of the history of New York and are a powerful reminder of the unique
capacity of film to safely retain the visual memories of our history and culture.”
Image Entertainment, Inc. is a leading independent licensee, producer and distributor of home
entertainment programming in North America, with more than 2,800 exclusive DVD titles and 175
exclusive CD titles in domestic release and approximately 300 programs internationally via sublicense
agreements. For many of its titles, the Company has exclusive audio and broadcast rights and, through
its subsidiary Egami Media, Inc., exclusive video on demand, streaming video and download rights.
The Company is headquartered in Chatsworth, California, and has a domestic distribution facility in Las
Vegas, Nevada. For more information about Image Entertainment, Inc., please go to www.imageentertainment.com.
UNSEEN CINEMA is sponsored by Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Deutsches Filmmuseum,
Frankfurt am Main, and made possible in part by Eastman Kodak Company, Cineric, Inc., and Film
Preservation Associates, Inc.
UNSEEN CINEMA DVD preview screener, photographs, and information available at
www.unseen-cinema.com
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