New York Portrait, Chapter II (1981)

• 74%
• 1981
• Documentary
• Peter Hutton

Figures and their shadows play sidewalk games. Far-off figures gather on rooftop under the slow crawl of a clouded sky. Skywriters stitch the ether and skyscrapers sprout from their silhouettes. Architecture frames a drifting airship, then finds a bustling Sunday crowd. Festivities regale the throng along the harbor, before sleeping strangers rest in abandonment. A figure slogs, in makeshift trappings, through flooded streets - another fjords the quagmire searching for outlets to plunge. Radiant patterns of fluid flower and flow to the withdrawing drain, as the smothering thunderheads skulk away.