Robert Florey is the supreme instance of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent. He began his career as a film critic and journalist in the early 1920s and came to some small prominence by making a very cheap experimental short called ‘The Life and Death of 9413; a Hollywood Extra’ in 1928. In 1929 he directed two very different movies. One was The Marx Brothers first movie ‘The Cocoanuts’. The other was a short called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’. The film is a montage of Manhattan architecture and belongs to a genre that would have been familiar to audiences of the new art cinema movement. “City symphonies”—documentary images of urban landscapes edited into semiabstract visual rhythms—had begun in the United States with Manhatta (1921), and others had been imported from Europe, most influentially Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). To be honest, whatever startling effect the film produced at the time, reveling in the grandeur of the new and imposing architecture of New York, is considerably faded. But it’s possible to get lost in the imagery particularly with the lights out and the right mind-altering substances in use. This print of the complete film runs ten minutes–there are abbreviated prints out there for some reason–and is soundless. I’ve provided a recording of George Gershwin’s magnificent (and oddly obscure) ‘Second Rhapsody’ to be played along with the film. To be modest but truthful, I think the combo of the rhapsody with the film is a stroke of true inspiration on my part. But you’ll be the judge of that.