Whether it was “A Complete Unknown” with 1960s Greenwich Village or “Anora” with present-day Brooklyn, filmmakers put new frames around the city.
When I was a teenager, the New York City I saw in the movies seemed attainable, the sort of place to bring big ambitions and a few suitcases. These films weren’t “The Warriors” or “Escape From New York” or anything directed by Martin Scorsese. Instead they starred plucky heroines living on tree-lined streets who donned heels and pencil skirts for their magazine jobs. I envied the dinner parties in creaky, book-filled homes, the pastrami on rye downtown, the piles of books characters clutched alongside rumpled copies of a certain New York newspaper.
New York City looked aspirational and magical and fun. A fantasy, I now know, but an alluring one. I thought about those movies a lot this year, because of the almost complete disappearance of that particular version of the metropolis from Hollywood’s imagination. Though New York was perpetually onscreen, it was a different city.
It was clear in 2024 that the way we watch New York has changed. That’s not too surprising if you’ve walked around Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn lately, which mostly resemble an Instagram feed: store after store selling cool minimalist clothing and pebbled leather bags from retailers who rely on influencers to sell products. Those streets aren’t on the big screen anymore. They’re the playground of vertical video and social media now.
That’s had interesting effects on the movies. Filmmakers are putting different frames around the city these days, and a lot of the time it’s a city that has since disappeared.
James Mangold’s surprisingly good film about Bob Dylan’s very early career, “A Complete Unknown,” is probably the best of the bunch, evoking the early 1960s on the streets of Greenwich Village not just in the setting but also in the color and texture of its image. Watch actual footage from the era and it’s clear how careful the reconstruction was, and the rich camerawork rounds it out. This is a dirty, exciting New York, full of chaos and smoke and possibility down every coffeehouse staircase.
This post was originally published on here
