New York stories playing at the Museum of Modern Art
Part of the charm of New York is its only partly tongue-in-cheek reluctance to grant that anyone else does anything better. Beaches? Yeah, the Caribbean's got that whole luxury thing down but really the Hamptons are more convenient. Tacos? Sure, they're pretty good in Mexico but have you tried that place at 49th and 10th? Studio movies? Well, yeah, Los Angeles is where it's at now but between the wars all the killer action was right here ...
The last is the intriguing premise of Hollywood on the Hudson, a month-long season of movies playing at the Museum of Modern Art. It's partly curated by Richard Koszarski, from whose scholarly study it takes its name and argument: that in the 1920s and 1930s, the relatively independent-minded film-makers operating on the east coast set the template for the development of the film industry by focusing on technical innovation and niche audiences, rather than the one-size-fits-all grandiosity that the California studios developed and had to wean themselves off after world war one.
Book-ended by DW Griffith's return from Los Angeles to New York in 1919 and the World's Fair two decades later, the season includes work from the likes of Louise Brooks, Rudolph Valentino and the Marx Brothers, as well as little-seen pictures touching on the Jewish and African-American experience of the city. As well as material filmed on sound stages in the area, there's some fascinating location work that documents New York at a time of remarkable upheaval. Not that this location work suggests any movement towards documentary realism. At times, the conflation of realism and melodrama yields peculiar, borderline surreal results.
A case in point is the silent portmanteau feature While New York Sleeps (1920), which screened at the weekend with live piano accompaniment. Directed by Charles Brabin – the Liverpool-born filmmaker who married the silent-screen siren Theda Bara – its three stories of criminality span the social spectrum of "the great metropolis, New York", and a variety of formal approaches, while retaining cohesion through its use of the same actors as each story's leads and some consistent moral lessons (such as, er, women are deceitful hussies)...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
The last is the intriguing premise of Hollywood on the Hudson, a month-long season of movies playing at the Museum of Modern Art. It's partly curated by Richard Koszarski, from whose scholarly study it takes its name and argument: that in the 1920s and 1930s, the relatively independent-minded film-makers operating on the east coast set the template for the development of the film industry by focusing on technical innovation and niche audiences, rather than the one-size-fits-all grandiosity that the California studios developed and had to wean themselves off after world war one.
Book-ended by DW Griffith's return from Los Angeles to New York in 1919 and the World's Fair two decades later, the season includes work from the likes of Louise Brooks, Rudolph Valentino and the Marx Brothers, as well as little-seen pictures touching on the Jewish and African-American experience of the city. As well as material filmed on sound stages in the area, there's some fascinating location work that documents New York at a time of remarkable upheaval. Not that this location work suggests any movement towards documentary realism. At times, the conflation of realism and melodrama yields peculiar, borderline surreal results.
A case in point is the silent portmanteau feature While New York Sleeps (1920), which screened at the weekend with live piano accompaniment. Directed by Charles Brabin – the Liverpool-born filmmaker who married the silent-screen siren Theda Bara – its three stories of criminality span the social spectrum of "the great metropolis, New York", and a variety of formal approaches, while retaining cohesion through its use of the same actors as each story's leads and some consistent moral lessons (such as, er, women are deceitful hussies)...