Another reviewer, going by the moniker 'Lor' reviewed this film already and I have got to hand it to them--they got this one pegged. While the notes for this film say it's 'genuinely avant-garde' and it 'anticipates underground cinema works of the 1960s-1970s', I think it really is just a very sloppily made piece of film that, surprisingly, wasn't just thrown in the trash! It seems that the film looking this fuzzy and incomprehensible was NOT intended but was an experiment in time-lapse cinematography. Yet, apparently, some folks have taken a fuzzy and seemingly worthless piece of film and embraced it. I guess it takes all kinds....but I am not one of them! A bad film where it isn't even of a lot of historical value because it's so fuzzy and jerky that you'll barely recognize any of these New York landmarks. Not good....not good at all. However, squinting as you watch it actually does make viewing a bit better--try it and see what I mean!
2 Reviews
One man's mess is another man's "avant-garde"
lor_11 April 2011
This bungled short film from the first decade of cinema manages to turn a simple assignment, photographing Manhattan from a yacht, into an exercise in Blur-o-Vision. Filmmakers Weed and Armitage should have tossed it in the wastebasket.
But no -wait a hundred years or so and pointy-headed historians will hail the slop as avant garde "presaging the underground films of the '60s and '70s".
Yes, just as a generation of simpletons have made "bad" into "good" (rhymes with Ed Wood), moronic academics seem to think that out of focus footage is a New Thing, an artistic statement. Sorry guys, it's merely incompetence. This sloppy attempt at time-lapse photography went awry in 1902, and that's the long and short of it.
Like the current rebirth of lousy 3-D photography and its attendant headaches for the viewer (literal headaches), or the worshiping of false "anamorphic" (look up the term in the dictionary, folks) DVD versions of any old movie, ignorance can get you into trouble.
But no -wait a hundred years or so and pointy-headed historians will hail the slop as avant garde "presaging the underground films of the '60s and '70s".
Yes, just as a generation of simpletons have made "bad" into "good" (rhymes with Ed Wood), moronic academics seem to think that out of focus footage is a New Thing, an artistic statement. Sorry guys, it's merely incompetence. This sloppy attempt at time-lapse photography went awry in 1902, and that's the long and short of it.
Like the current rebirth of lousy 3-D photography and its attendant headaches for the viewer (literal headaches), or the worshiping of false "anamorphic" (look up the term in the dictionary, folks) DVD versions of any old movie, ignorance can get you into trouble.
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