Bridges-Go-Round 1
New York City’s bridges dissolve into shifting abstractions through montage, superimposition, and color. Set to an electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron, the film transforms familiar urban structures into an uncanny, alien landscape (an alternate version of the film features a jazz score by Teo Macero).
Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round (1958) is a landmark of American avant-garde cinema that radically reimagines the monumental architecture of New York City through the lens of pure kinetic choreography. Commissioned originally for the American Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair (Expo 58), the film draws heavily upon Clarke’s background as a modern dancer to pioneer what she termed “choreocinema”—transforming static urban infrastructure into a weightless, fluid ballet. Through a dynamic array of rapid pans, optical superimpositions, color filtration, and negative-positive reversals, massive suspension bridges such as the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queensboro bridges are stripped of their physical mass. Saturated in stark hues of cobalt blue, amber, and crimson, the steel cables, girders, and stone towers twist and pivot against one another, effectively turning industrial civil engineering into an ethereal, dancing mobile suspended in mid-air.
Beyond its visual virtuosity, Bridges-Go-Round is renowned for its radical formal experiment with sound and sensory perception. Clarke paired the identical, roughly four-minute visual sequence with two radically contrasting soundtracks and intended them to be screened back-to-back. One version features an eerie, extraterrestrial electronic tape score composed by synth pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron (famed for their work on Forbidden Planet), which casts the bridges as alien, robotic monoliths floating in an unsettling cosmic void. The alternating version is scored by avant-garde jazz composer Teo Macero, whose cool, syncopated brass and percussion immediately transform the same visual rhythms into a breezy, swinging celebration of mid-century urban vitality. By juxtaposing these distinct acoustic realities against identical footage, Clarke brilliantly demonstrated how musical syntax fundamentally dictates emotional meaning and cinematic space, securing the film’s status as a masterwork of cinematic rhythm and perception.
