Outerborough (Bill Morrison, 2005)

A film by Bill Morrison
Running time: 8 min 30 sec
B/W, silent

In 1899 a cameraman for American Mutoscope & Biograph mounted his camera to the front of a trolley traveling over the Brooklyn Bridge. Three 90-foot rolls were edited to together to complete the journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn. As the film was shot on the short-lived 68mm gauge, it had not been screened before modern audiences until the British Film Institute recently restored it to 35mm. As a commission by the Museum of Modern Art for the re-opening of the Museum in 2005, Morrison took this remarkable footage and recombined it with itself to form a split-screen extrapolation in Cinemascope.

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