Film #5 Manhattan

In 1979 when I first saw Woody Allen's Manhattan I had yet to make my first trip to New York but thanks to Gordon Willis' glorious black and white cinematography I walked out of the theater feeling as though I had. Now I don't remember if I had seen Annie Hall at that point, but even if I had, I was still a lover of the Woody Allen of Take the Money and Run and Sleeper and as a twenty year-old somewhat sheltered Southern Ohio college student who had never been in a cab or on a train or plane, much of the humor in Manhattan was, I suppose, largely lost on me. That didn't matter, because the richness of those black and white images on that huge screen was more than enough. When combined with the music of Gershwin I would have loved the film even if the characters hadn't spoken a word.

As I grew older and hopefully a bit more sophisticated, I began to appreciate Manhattan on other levels and that's the real reason this film makes the list. In some ways I feel as though I grew up with this movie. Each time I would see it I would take something new away and I grew to appreciate that Woody, as he had first done in Annie Hall, was saying so much about love, loss and our society while still making us laugh. It would be several more years and multiple viewings of the film before I would actual set foot in Manhattan and even though much of the New York of 1979 was long changed by the time I began visiting there in the late eighties, I would think first of those Gordon Willis images as I approached Penn Station on the New Jersey Transit train.

In the last few years, as I have been begun staying and working in Manhattan for extended periods, I have replaced much of Gordon Willis' cinematography with a collection of my own personal images and memories, still yet, Manhattan represents a feeling and atmosphere that is as real to me today, as it was exotic and foreign in 1979. So now, thirty plus years later, Woody Allen's Manhattan, is new to me yet again. Now, I appreciate it as New Yorkers might have when it first opened in 1979 -  from the inside out and often when I'm walking through its' streets it still strikes me as "a town that exists in black and white and pulsates to the great tunes of George Gershwin".