ABSTRACT
In 1921, the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler and the photographer Paul Strand, who had been introduced by Alfred Stieglitz and were part of his circle, released a ten-minute short entitled Manhatta. Manhatta was shot in the spring and summer of 1920 in Lower Manhattan and edited soon afterwards. The film was re-released in New York in 1926, playing at the Cameo Theater and the Film Guild, and it was billed under its actual title, Manhatta, for the very first time. The one feature that seems most at odds with what would come to be known as the city symphony style is Manhatta's heavy reliance on intertitles, but it is important to note that they are not used in an expository manner, but in a poetic one, and that, in fact, they were drawn from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
