NYC RGB

A day in the life of New York, as seen from a 20th-floor apartment window. The legendary silhouette of old and new skyscrapers. The traffic below in the grid of streets. The wisps of steam and smoke rising from the rooftops. The iconic forest of antennas, water towers, and chimneys that shape New York’s silhouette. The clear sky suggests a warm season. These familiar elements, so recognizable to cinephiles worldwide, are reinterpreted—if not reinvented—in a short, wordless visual collage through simple technical manipulations and optical effects, offering a contemporary yet nostalgic reimagining of the Big Apple.

Immersing the city in an Ektachrome-like vision, filmmaker Viktoria Schmid layers static shots of the buildings and the apartment from which they are filmed, each shot filtered in red, green, and blue—the "R" (red), "G" (green), and "B" (blue) of the title. These initials reference an optical processing system that allows all colors to be built from these three primary colors. Working together, the treatment, the editing, and the soundscape of ordinary urban sounds create a novel impression of the city, oscillating between archival footage (although NYC RGB is not that at all) and ultra-modern postcard. The outlines of static objects lose their sharpness, while moving objects animate in red, green, and blue, blending due to the superimposition of images and introducing a blur that creates a ghostly effect. The air seems to vibrate as if the city were a mirage, like the distant view in the summer heat. This process gives the city a pulsing quality, creating the impression that it might gradually vanish into a shimmering, strange disintegration—as if the New York of yesterday and the New York of today were colliding.

Claire Valade
Critic and Programmer