'Mirror Manhattan' is one of a number of films by Brian Frye that exist only as unique originals: rather than making prints, he gave them away to friends.
The lower Manhattan skyline seen from a moving boat is superimposed on a similar portion of landscape filmed upside-down; water moves across the screen in the same directions and at similar speeds in both layers of imagery. The movements of boat and water become parallels for the passage of the film through the camera, recalling cinema's links to forms of motorized travel that originated in the nineteenth century, while the Manhattan skyline is linked to the rectilinear the film frame. The juxtaposition of rightside-up and upside-down signifies that a film image is itself an arbitrary construct, reminding the viewer that the image on celluloid, like the image in the retina, is physically oriented upside-down. In his uniquely modest way, Frye argues with the earlier modernist tradition in filmmaking and art, in which the artist functioned as a formgiver, offering iconic images meant to reveal absolute or transcendent truths.

Fred Camper