A Bronx Morning is a 1931 short documentary film (11 minutes) by Jay Leyda.
The film is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, namely, a portrait of life in the Bronx, New York City. Then as now the Bronx is a working-class borough, filled at the time by hordes of Eastern European immigrants. Leyda's camera arrives in the Bronx via elevated train and spends its time mostly at street level, showing store fronts, street vendors, people going to work, and children playing in the streets.
Compare Manhatta, a 1921 documentary short that focused on the grand skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, rather than the humble brick buildings and neighborhood stores of New York. On the strength of this film Jay Leyda was invited to study with none other than Sergei Eisenstein.
Tropes:
- Big Applesauce: A humble working-class part of it.
- Disturbed Doves: One of the most striking shots in the movie shows a flock of pigeons, disturbed by something, suddenly taking flight from a rooftop and swooping around as the camera follows them.
- Documentary: A visual record of how a residential Bronx neighborhood looked in the depths of the Great Depression.
- The Faceless: Leyda chose to avoid showing faces whenever possible, especially the adults. We see a woman apparently talking in the street and a different woman rocking a baby carriage, and both times the camera is framed to cut off the women at the neck.
- Idiosyncratic Wipe: On a couple of occasions, awnings lowered from shops that are opening up for the day are also used as scene wipes.
- Ironic Juxtaposition: The Great Depression isn't directly addressed: while all the people are clad in distinctly lower-class garments we don't see any bums or bread lines or soup kitchens. But one juxtaposition has a title card saying "The Bronx does business...", followed by a montage of storefront signs saying "FIRE SALE," "BELOW COST," "LOST OUR LEASE" and the like.
- Match Cut:
- An extreme closeup of two tomatoes on a sidewalk fruit stand cuts to a closeup of the word "LOOK", the two O's matching the tomatoes. The "LOOK" is the first word on a sandwich board sign being worn by a man walking away from the camera.
- The pigeons swooping about the neighborhood are repeatedly matched with shots of discarded newspapers fluttering down from the top of a tenement.
- P.O.V. Cam: The entire opening sequence is this, as the camera arrives in the Bronx via elevated train.
