NY NY
Film
Comment Vol.45 No.1, New York, 2009
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
The first Blade movie (1998) opens with a scene befitting a contemporary tale of urban night life. Pump Panel’s bone-crunching acid techno reconstruction of New Order’s Confusion peaks with the gushing of blood from ceiling sprinklers prior to Blade (Wesley Snipes) decimating the nocturnal denizens. It’s a dark mix of industrial architecture, narcotic addiction and black rhythmic noise. In other words, it’s cine-jazz – a cinematic concoction of how the city at night is persistently auralised by the intoxicating modernism of black music.
A recent restoration of an obscure amateur short by Francis Thompson titled NY NY (circa mid-1950s) obtusely connects to this audiovisual ‘sonography’. Ostensibly an impressionistic 16mm cine-portrait of New York city’s architectural aspects and socio-urban activities lensed through various filters, NY NY serves as a semiological catalogue of how the busyness of the American metropolis and its fractalised energy found its sound in jazz idioms. Gene Forrell’s score recalls George Gershwin’s paeans to bustling melodiousness, which popularised a modernist pastoralism of early 20th C citadels, their mechanised thoroughfares, and the city folk who lived there.
