“Manhattan”
The most enduring shot from Woody Allen’s memorable film “Manhattan,” is this early morning scene with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton looking onto the Queensboro Bridge. This image alone is probably responsible for more tourism and new residents coming into the city than any number of advertising dollars the city ever spent promoting itself.
Manhattan is as stunningly designed a movie as has ever been created. This is largely thanks to the work of Gordon Willis, a master cinematographer who, apart from his incredible work on this film, was also responsible for photographing an alarmingly high share of some of the most favorite movies of all time: “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part II,” “All the President’s Men,” and “The Parallax View,” among others.
Nicknamed “The Prince of Darkness, it’s completely evident that few others will ever master black and white with the same skill as Willis. “Perhaps what makes his work so singularly stunning was that it never seemed too enraptured with its own beauty; his work in ‘Manhattan’ is sometimes brazenly abstract, but when abstraction and naturalism collided, he managed to find an unexpected, almost impossibly judicious balance between the two.”
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