Robert Florey is the supreme instance in the silent era of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent.
SKYSCRAPER SYMPHONY, his montage of Manhattan architecture, is in a genre that would have been familiar to audiences of the new art cinema movement. 'City symphonies' - documentary images of urban landscapes edited into semiabstract visual rhythms - had begun in the United States with MANHATTA (1921), and others had been imported from Europe, most influentially BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927).
Born in Paris in 1900, Florey came to America in 1921 as a newspaper correspondent. Beginning in 1923, he directed a few shorts and minor features but earned higher salary and satisfaction as assistant to the era’s top directors - Henry King, Frank Borzage, King Vidor, and Josef von Sternberg among them - while writing books to explain Hollywood to the French. In 1925, he also began experimenting with his own short films. First to be shown publicly was the small masterpiece of expressionist satire THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413 - A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA (1927). - Scott Simmon
