In the spring of 1924, cameraman Alfred Dillimtash Brick and the Fox News crew in New York City started filming the Looney Lens series for Fox newsreels, which today survives only in outtakes and partially edited footage. The spirit of these films is aptly described in a Fox library index card: “crazy cameraman with a looney lens let loose in mad Manhattan finds the city all jazzed up”. By using trick photography, various glass filters, and a mirror ball, Brick and his colleagues go around town and shoot footage in different locations, from affluent Fifth Avenue to working-class Tenth Avenue, providing a lighthearted portrait of New York City. Streets bustling with people, cars, streetcars, as well as with old-fashioned horse-drawn carriages, are photographed in wide angles, well-known buildings – the Woolworth building in Lower Broadway was then the world’s tallest – spin around and bend, and bodies and faces are pulled out of shape with amusing effects. The Fox crew dodges the traffic and play around in front of the camera. In the mirror ball stunt, they engage in a curious pas de deux: the camera is behind them, recording their reflected image. Al Brick went on to become one of Fox’s top cameramen, and two decades later he would make headlines as the only cameraman to shoot footage of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Daniela Currò