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In New York, a distraught woman sits in her rented room in a rocking chair. Outside, people shop and engage in commerce, men light pipes, hands type. A mother and baby play peek-a-boo: things are okay for many. The woman continues to rock. A drunk is arrested; a Salvation Army band plays, kids run around. Protesting unemployed workers appear. The rocking woman's face becomes more distorted. Military officers parade. A man picks through discarded clothes, hobos sit listless. These men are veterans of the Great War, now forgotten, many alcoholic. Passersby ignore men passed out on sidewalks. The woman stops rocking and takes action.
Foreboding is the word I would use to describe this short, it takes documenting footage of life during the Great Depression and through the power of editing does some interesting things with it.
We see signs of happiness, a mother playing with her child, kids goofing off in the street but as it goes on it begins presenting grimmer imagery. War footage, men collapsed on the street contrasted with slaughtered pigs, all intercut with quick inserts of a distressed woman rocking back and forth, ending with her blocking out all the light from her home.
It’s fun to know that experimentation in film editing reaches far back.
A city symphony of sorts, but the jazzy exultation of urban life has given way to a city filled with people in despair, the symphonic transposed into a mournful lament. Lewis Jacobs diligently applies the principles of Russian montage directly to Great Depression America, only revolutionary propaganda has curdled into mass despair.
The only section made of what had been intended as a four part film, there is an undeniable sense of this being just a fragment of a whole, especially as the intended post-synchronized soundtrack was never completed. But that this exists at all is reason enough to treasure it—by 1940 it was considered lost, and only rediscovered & restored in the 1990s. It now stands as an important—and rare—experiment and artifact of its era.
