""Robert Florey is the supreme instance in the silent era of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent. Skyscraper symphony, his montage of Manhattan architecture, is in a genre that would have been familiar to audiences of the new art cinema movement. 'City symphonies'--documentary images of urban landscapes edited into semiabstract visual rhythms--had begun in the United States with Paul Strand and Chalres Sheeler's Manhatta (1921), and others had been imported from Europe. ... The nine-minute film is structured subtly through distinct segments. The stately minute-and-a-half overture introduces impassive building facades via steady tripod shots linked by overlapping dissolves. After a fade-out-and-in, the complex central movements explode initially with vertiginous hand-held shots and canted angles generally linked by stark cuts. Urban details--lampposts, smokestacks, clock faces, flagpoles--are each introduced with a series of shots before joining the mix. After another fade-out-fade-in, the calmer two-minute finale reveals city crowds and, as coda, construction equipment"----Film notes by Scott Simmon."
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