Hilary Harris’s 1975 Organism feels like a missing link in the chain of film portraits of New York City as a pulsing, living thing. Like Whitman, whose “Leaves of Grass” provided the text for their1921 film Manhatta Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler showed “million-footed Manhattan…descend[ing] to her pavements” and forests of buildings growing up to the sky. Then, by the time Godfrey Reggion made Koyaanisqatsi in 1982, the metaphor was solid enough to use the time-lapse photography Harris pioneered to diagnose the city’s terminal illness.
Maybe what modern city life needs to return it to full health is more post offices shaped like mailboxes. I combined frames from the various cuts of Harris’s slow, time-lapse pan in order to get a picture of the whole thing. Anyone know where this was?
Watch Manhatta and Organism at Ubu [ubu.com, via brian sholis]
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the making of, by greg allen