NYC RGB

This gentle trip from Viktoria Schmid surveys the architecture of Manhattan in a series of fixed-frame compositions, each exposed three times, through red, green, and blue filters. The city’s range of beiges, browns, and greys remain steady, while highlights and shadows splinter into geometric arrays of color. This tension between consistency and change draws the mind toward one of the traits of modern New York which Schmid avoids: its glass-facade new construction. The matter of what goes into making a city durable as both idea and place is a heavy one, though the film’s opalescent skies do help to lighten it.