1905 - Panorama from the Times Building, New York - Wallace McCutcheon

It is not an over-exaggeration to state that Panorama from the Times Building, New York provides the audience with a new way of seeing. Panorama is similar to some of the Lumiere Brothers’ ‘actualities’, except that it provides us with a breathtaking view of New York from the top of the Times Building. Within the space of a decade, film has gone from a still shot of workers outside the Lumiere Brothers’ factory to a daring aerial shot of a substantial part of New York. The film was shot by Wallace McCutcheon, who also directed the briefly discussed 1905 film Personal.

In 1905, in the world of art, Matisse and the Les Fauves were pushing beyond Post-Impressionism (See Matisse's Open Window above) and Picasso had left Barcelona for Paris a year earlier and was heading towards ‘inventing’ Cubism alongside Braque. Film, an artistic medium still in its infancy, was also providing its audience with fresh perspectives. We can only speculate as to what the reaction of the contemporary audience would have been to seeing this film, but there is little doubt that it would have had a startling effect on them (I apologise if I seem to make this point about most films but access to such information would enrich this blog). The depth of vision when at 0:29 is remarkable even to the contemporary audience and opens up an exciting amount of new possibilities for film. The motion picture camera is providing the audience with a perspective they would not be able to obtain from any other art form. It also raises the audience’s expectations in terms of what a single frame can contain.

People and transport are barely visible in this film: the city, specifically New York, becomes the protagonist of this film. The writer Thomas Wolfe once said, “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years”. It can be argued that this is largely down to the city’s rich cinematic history – not only is the city familiar to many viewers, but it has a distinctive personality that usurps any other filmed city - Panorama begins our relationship with New York.  

The Library of Congress tells us exactly what can be seen in the film:

The view is from the top of the then newly-erected Times Building, at a height of approximately twenty stories. The film opens with a vertical pan, going from the street below up to the sky. The photographer then makes a pan to the north over the tops of the buildings from Bryant Park, south of 42nd Street (behind the New York Public Library) [Frame: 1078] up 6th Avenue to the Hippodrome Theatre at 43rd Street [1866]. A marquee on the theater reads "A Yankee Circus On Mars." The camera continues to rotate toward 44th and 45th Streets between 6th and 7th Avenues, until coming to rest looking directly north up Times Square to 46th Street, where Broadway (left) and 7th Avenue (right) diverge again [3676].

Can any New Yorkers tell us which of these buildings remain in place, and if the Times building is still standing?

 

New York Subway, directed by G.W. Bitzer, provides us with a viewpoint of the other end of New York: its subway. The Subway itself had only opened a year earlier; once again this film would have bedazzled the audience. Yet again, a comparison can be made with another Lumiere Brothers’ film. In Arrivee d'un train en gare a La Ciotat the stationary camera captured a train’s arrival, in this film we are given a tracking shot of a train’s journey from one station to another. The shot of the train as it passes through a tunnel is both hypnotic and claustrophobic; the gradually diminishing light in this shot is quite a sight.

It also gives us our first glimpse of the 'underworld' - it will be interesting to chronicle film's relation with this particular space.