Manhatta

Two of America's great modernist photographers, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, spent a summer shooting New York City and assembled the result into this ten-minute film, organized around lines from Walt Whitman's poetry. Skyscrapers, harbor traffic, and crowds are framed as pure geometry — it is generally considered the first avant-garde film made in America and the earliest of the "city symphony" documentaries that culminated in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Man with a Movie Camera. The film is in the public domain.