Manhattan, a thousand times mapped
For many, New York means Manhattan, which seems a bit reductive, but it's where many of the city's most iconic landmarks are concentrated, starting with theEmpire State Building, which the final scene of King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) left its mark on our memories. West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1962) begins with an aerial view of the island, before plunging us straight into the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks in a New York still reeking of the '50s. In Spielberg's adaptation, released in 2021, many scenes were shot in the neighborhoods where the action is supposed to take place, particularly Upper Manhattan. Times Square and its innumerable illuminated signs can be seen in films such as Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), which give an authentic, harsh image of the New York streets of the time. Just a stone's throw away, the Trump Tower, which makes film appearances(The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan), enjoys a notoriety that has grown recently. Right next door is Tiffany's, in front of which Audrey Hepburn window-shops at the start of Diamonds on the Sofa (1961). There's also Broadway and its theaters, Wall Street, the district of finance and traders( Oliver Stone'sWall Street, 1987, Mary Harron's American Psycho , 2000, or Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013), and not far away, the monumental Grand Central Station, as busy as ever, from North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) to Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012). The eight streets of Little Italy were immortalized in The Godfather or Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), while Michael Cimino gave a controversial, fantasy-filled depiction of Chinatown in The Year of the Dragon (1985). Greenwich Village, the neighborhood of bohemian folk musicians in the 60s, was nostalgically depicted in Next stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976) but also more recently in Mad Men (2005-2015) or Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2013). Another famous Manhattan enclave, SoHo, known for having been the refuge of artists and musicians, finds a particularly striking representation in After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985), which organizes the almost phantasmagorical confrontation between the young yuppies beginning to repopulate the city and the chaotic, as if uncontrollable energy of its nightlife. The city's most prestigious library, the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, with its grand staircases, marble walls, chandeliers and ceiling frescoes, has been the setting for all kinds of films: the zany fantasy comedy Ghostbusters (Harold Ramis, 1984), the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004) and Sex and the City (1998-2004), where it is the scene of a wedding that turns into a disaster. It's on the stairs of the Met that the heroines of Gossip Girl like to rendezvous, while the museum's Egyptian Hall is the setting for the famous meeting between Harry and Sally( Rob Reiner'sWhen Harry Met Sally, 1989). Not far away, Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm in a famous scene at Katz' Deli, an institution of New York gastronomy. Last but not least, there's Central Park, that well of greenery that never ceases to make cameos in film, as in Jonathan Glazer's Birth (2004), whose bizarre premise and maniacally precise direction make it a worthy successor to Kubrick, or Fredrick Wiseman's lead role in a documentary specially devoted to it (1990).
New York Multitudes
The Queensboro Bridge between Manhattan and Queens provides the backdrop for Diane Keaton and Woody Allen's nighttime stroll through Sutton Square on the East River in Manhattan (1979). Queens is home to the Kaufman Astoria Studio, founded in 1920 and still in operation today. Popular series such as Orange Is The New Black (2013-2019) are filmed there. Queens is home to one of New York's largest and oldest cemeteries, Calvary Cemetery, which is featured in The Godfather. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connects Staten Island and Brooklyn, and symbolizes the upwardly mobile hopes of the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1979) in an era before gentrification. The Bronx and Harlem are historically neighborhoods populated by the African-American population, but this is far from summarizing their diversity. For example, The Lords (Philip Kaufman, 1979) features Italian teenagers in the Bronx. Recently, the success of Joker (Todd Philipps, 2019) turned a flight of stairs in the Bronx into a tourist attraction where Joaquin Phoenix performs the strangest dance. American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007) describes the underworld that developed against the backdrop of drug trafficking in the neighborhood at the same time. Another mafia film, Little Odessa (James Gray, 1994) is a masterful first film in the milieu of the Russian community established in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. Violence has long been a feature of the city, as evidenced by the legendary blaxploitation film Shaft, Harlem's Red Nights (Gordon Parks, 1971), which, contrary to its title, shows little of Harlem, except for the mythical Apollo Theater. New York is full of legendary bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, an important protagonist of An Autumn's Tale (Mabel Cheung, 1987), a rare and sensitive film that shows a New York of rare authenticity through the eyes of a Chinese immigrant couple. The Williamsburg Bridge, which connects Lower Manhattan with Brooklyn, is another, which can be seen in The City Without Veils (Jules Dassin, 1948). Today, Brooklyn is home to the largest studios in the United States, after those in Hollywood, Steiner Studios, located on the site of the former Brooklyn Navy Yard, where a scene from the musical A Day in New York (Stanley Donen, 1949) was shot. Coney Island, an island transformed into a peninsula and a residential and seaside part of Brooklyn, is where the main character of Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) spent her childhood. Woody Allen returned there again recently for Wonder Wheel (2017), a necessarily nostalgic evocation of his amusement park in the 1960s. The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) in fact a stage in the journey of his gang of young thugs eager to fight. Many scenes from Requiem For a Dream (Darren Arofnosky), adapted from Hulbert Selby Jr, whose Brooklyn is the setting for most of the novels, were also filmed there. For a moving, summery and entertaining vision of New York, we recommend Wackness (Jonathan Levine, 2008) about the slightly idle summer of a slightly lost teenager in New York.
