The Manhattan Front
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“The Story of the Borderlands Is Not Singular”: Cathy Lee Crane on Drawing the Line
Filmmaker last interviewed veteran multimedia artist Cathy Lee Crane about her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front, which combined staged performances and archival footage from the National Archives in DC to present the strange but true entanglement of a WWI German saboteur with the progressive labor movement of activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. While Crane’s latest selection of works likewise resurrects buried US history, they tread territory even further back in time, all the way down to the border, and are currently being shown a continent away. Throughout the month of July, the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin will be showcasing several projects […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 18, 2022 -
“In the Master’s Narrative, We Don’t Hear the Stories of the Oppressed, the Disenfranchised, of Women”: Director Cathy Lee Crane on Her SF Indiefest Premiere, The Manhattan Front
Developed with the support of a 2013 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship, The Manhattan Front is experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane’s first feature-length narrative film in a career spanning over two decades. True to Crane’s hybrid art film roots, though, The Manhattan Front melds melodramatic acting on silent-film-styled sets with newly digitized archival footage of daily life in New York City and on the front lines during World War 1. Via this unconventional approach Crane presents the true story of how a German saboteur’s plans to prevent American munitions from reaching Britain during a period of official U.S. neutrality became entangled […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 11, 2018
