Yesterday I posted a 1929 art film by Robert Florey called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’. Above is the experimental film he made the year before in collaboration with montage artist and film theorist Slavko Vorkapich called…well, read the title of this post. There’s a good deal to understand about how the film was made (for $97 dollars apparently) and for that I’ll direct you to the films Wikipedia page. Now, it’s important that you mute the film so as to avoid the new score that was added. Florey and Vorkapich specifically edited the film to be played against the 1924 recording of ‘Rhapsody In Blue’, on which Gershwin performs the piano part. And so I’ve posted that recording, right underneath the film. Be careful to sync up picture and recording carefully–you’ll be quite amazed at how well the two work together. This sort of filmmaking was, at the time, incomprehensibly strange–and it still is. Florey is an unjustly overlooked figure and, aside from directing the Marx Brothers in ‘The Cocoanuts’, worked on relatively obscure Hollywood features, mostly with mid-to-low budgets. Apparently he was most comfortable finding his own experimental ways of working within the system and not having the pressure of a big-budget machine on his back. He ended his career directing gobs of television shows. A most unusual career path–there’s a nice (but too short) interview with him in ‘The Marx Brothers Scrapbook’ in which he recalls, in a bemused way, how he wound up directing their first film and how puzzled he was by the whole experience. And then he adds: ‘In a sense, ‘The Cocoanuts’ was an experimental movie’. Perhaps that’s why he was hired?…