“One belongs to New York instantly; one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years” --Thomas Wolfe

None of us has control over the place of his or her birth; we see first light in Patterson or Paducah or Pasadena, and that’s pretty much that. Whatever we may feel about our hometown or the place we’ve currently come to hang our hat, somewhere along the line many of us also adopt a spiritual home or two. You don’t really even need to have lived in a city for it to tantalize you or speak to your soul. Over time, I’ve formed serious romantic attachments to a number of such dream metropolises. San Francisco--my own personal Oz. Paris--mais naturellement! And then there’s New York, my true karmic home. As much as I love the Bay Area, I often find the lyrics to Dave Frishberg’s “Do You Miss New York?” buzzing through my skull: “Do you miss the anger, the action? Does this laid-back life style lack a certain satisfaction?” My infatuation with Manhattan definitely extends to the movies (or as my wife has observed: “How many times can a sane person watch Annie Hall!?). Fortunately, there’s no dearth of great Big Apple documentaries to somewhat assuage my longing for egg creams, Central Park, and the glint of the Chrysler Building at dusk.

New York in the Fifties.  2001. 52 min. DVD 1527

Based on the lamentably out-of-print 1992 memoir of the same name by journalist Dan Wakefield, NY in the 50s provides a charmingly desultory tour of The Apple in its culturally supercharged, booze-and-cigarette propelled post-war heyday. Wakefield and other rapidly graying hipsteratti appear on screen to tell the story of an earnest young generation of domestic refugees from the Eisenhower-era American mainstream looking for psychic asylum, enlightenment, and kicks on the isle of Manhattan, particularly in the village known as Greenwich.

Top Hat and Tales. 2001. 47 min. VIDEO/C 8492

How is it that a raw-boned, cowlick-haired, hard-drinking, gruff-speaking, ex-hobo journalist from the province of Aspen, Colorado came to create a publication that virtually defined the urbane style and image of Jazz Age New York in the popular imagination? That’s precisely what Harold Ross did in founding a little humor magazine called The New Yorker in 1925. Top Hat and Tales traces the often picaresque life and times of Ross, his magazine, and the unruly coterie of brilliant writers, cartoonists, and overworked fact-checkers that put The New Yorker on the literary and cultural map.

Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled.  2005. 152 min.  DVD 4670

Part of the fabulous Unseen Cinema collection of early American avant-garde films, Picturing a Metropolis offers a unique cinematic panoply of New York images, from the turn of the Century to the1930s.  The short films in the New York volume run the gamut from early Edison and Bioscope actualities of New York streets, buildings, bridges, and waterfronts, to experimental 1920s and 30s cinematic tone poems--“city symphonies”-- that attempted to visually capture the varied textures, patterns, movements, and moods of the great city. 

New York: A Documentary Film. 1999-2004. 152 min. DVD 3765-DVD 3770

As might be expected from a Burns Brother (Ric), New York is a fatly funded, thoroughly researched, and impeccably shot, narrated, and scored film that derives a good deal of its documentary effectiveness from the use of recognizable talking heads and spectacular archival photos and footage. Burns’ film chronicles the history of New York City from from its discovery in 1609 to 2003. Although it’s a story well-worth watching in its entirety (eight, sixty-minute installments), I do particularly like the fourth and fifth segments (“Power and the People” and “Cosmopolis), that look at the influx of immigrant populations into the city, and NY in the Jazz Age (including the Harlem Renaissance) respectively.

        --Gary Handman