Last week (or was it the week before?) I posted an experimental 1929 film called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’ by Robert Florey, which was a paeon to art deco New York and the then startling proliferation of the massive and impressive buildings of the era. On a very different note, avant garde filmmaker and historian Jay Leyda made an experimental paean to the Bronx two years later. Titled ‘A Bronx Morning’, the film is a succession of images of daily life in a very different neighborhood than mid-town Manhattan and provides what I think is a lovely and mesmerizing trip into a vanished world. Leyda was twenty-one years old when he made this film and a couple of years later journeyed to Russia to study filmmaking with Eisenstein. Later he curated at MOMA, taught at Yale and participated in many other impressive scholarly endeavors to enhance the dignity and standing of cinema at a time when so many considered it simply an enjoyably low-rent form of entertainment. Warning: Leyda meant for this film to be played silently, so as to allow the images to create their own power without support from music. So of course the person who posted this not only added music but narrates the story of the making of the film for fully half to the film’s 12 minute length. It’s interesting enough but simply not the way Leyda intended his study to be seen. For best results darken the room, turn off the sound, and patiently allow the nearly one-hundred year old images to speak for themselves.