The street photographer Arthur Fellig, better known by his alias “Weegee,” achieved notoriety throughout the 1930s and 1940s in New York for his stark, and often bleak, black-and-white snapshots of urban life. While his most famous work depicted the seedier side of the city—crime, violence, poverty—Weegee’s dramatic style, in which he frequently used bright flash in dark environments, also showcased everyday working- and lower-class life through a cinematic lens. His influence on 20th century American culture is broad, from his aesthetic impact on the visual style of film noir—most notably on 1948’s The Naked City, which even owes its title to Weegee’s first published photobook—to his career shift as a Hollywood paparazzo in the late ‘40s, which led him to satirize the spectacle of glamour and knock stars off their pedestals.
A true nightcrawler, Weegee was always the first photographer on the scene as soon as a murder, fire, or other urban catastrophe took place. With a police short-wave radio in his apartment and photo equipment in his car, Weegee would race to a location, shoot the event in question, develop his film while on the move in a subway conductor car, and shop the finished products around to local papers all before breakfast. What stands out about his work, however, is his emphasis on people’s emotional responses to scenes of tragedy and grotesquerie. While most photographers swarmed the same stretch of sidewalk, hurrying to get the same shot of a crime scene or car accident, Weegee pointed his lens at the faces of onlookers; in turn, capturing their excitement, horror, and grief.
Tonight, Anthology Film Archives will showcase their brand-new preservations of five rarely-seen 16mm short films by Weegee. Each of them presents a different version of New York, and a less sensational, more romantic side of the photographer. Weegee often experimented with kaleidoscope filming, transforming scenes of ice skaters at Rockefeller Center into geometric patterns, and the lights of Times Square into a dazzling dance of neon. The program's opening short, Cocktail Party (1946), is a relatively straightforward home movie that documents the release party for Weegee’s second photobook. Critics, authors, and well-dressed attendees all drift in front of the camera, but as the night goes on, more Weegee-esque characters emerge, such as a scantily-clad, heavily tattooed lady. Screening as part of this program is also his most famous film, Weegee’s New York (1946-48/51), an impressionistic love letter to the city. Edited by Amos Vogel, the film’s filters and double-exposures warp the streets and blur the pedestrians into a dreamlike collage until the sun sets and the neon lights turn on, reflecting off of the slick sidewalks. As in his photography, the night is when the city really comes alive in Weegee’s New York.
Weegee’s Short Film Programs screens this evening, January 31, and on February 1 and 6, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Weegee’s Camera Magic.”
