Manhatta is a short documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 directed by painter Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler

Charles Rettew Sheeler, Jr. was an American artist. He is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century.-Early life and career:...

 and photographer Paul Strand

Paul Strand

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century...

.

Production background

Manhatta documents the look of early-20th-century Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

. With the city as subject, the film consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view from a skyscraper

Skyscraper

A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building of many stories, often designed for office and commercial use. There is no official definition or height above which a building may be classified as a skyscraper...

. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions.

The film was an attempt to show the filmmakers' love for the city of New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. Manhatta was a collaboration between painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The intertitle

Intertitle

In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...

s include excerpts from the writings of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

.

Preservation status

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry

National Film Registry

The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...

, and was restored for the DVD set Unseen Cinema

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941 is a 7-disc and 19-hour DVD retrospective released by Image Entertainment in October 2005, and which includes some of the earliest American experimental film. It includes the work of:...

in October 2005. The film was completely restored in January 2009 by archivist Bruce Posner, working with film restoration company Lowry Digital. Posner spent close to four years returning the film to its original glory.

See also

• Experimental film
  Experimental film
  Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
  
  
• Rien que les heures
  Rien que les heures
  Rien que les heures is a 1926 experimental silent film by Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti showing the life of Paris through one day in 45 minutes...
  
  (1926)
• Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927)
• Man With a Movie Camera
  Man with a Movie Camera
  Man with a Movie Camera , sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta...
  
  (1929)