Mick Hartley

The Photographers' Gallery off Oxford Street has an exhibition of the works of pioneering street photographer Helen Levitt, who documented the life of New York neighbourhoods such as the Lower East Side, Bronx, and Spanish Harlem for some seven decades from her earliest work in the Thirties. I've featured her before – here and here from the Forties, and here on the subway in the Seventies.

One delight from the exhibition was her 1948 film In the Street – "an urban documentary focusing on the children of New York City's Upper East Side capturing New York's street energy with scenes of candid social interaction; children playing adults, dancing around, fighting, playing rough games hitting each other, making neighboring adults upset for rowdiness, wearing masks on Halloween, etc.". Happily it's on YouTube:

The gallery makes much of the influence of surrealism on Levitt, with the interest in children's undisciplined play and their games as a kind of counter-narrative to the regimented life of a society under capitalism. No doubt that's true: surrealism was a big deal at the time, before Dali made it just another showbiz style, and Andre Breton buried it under a weight of pompous Marxist-style manifestos. But what really comes through, apart from the joy of the children's play, is the sheer vibrancy of street life back then. It's all gone now. 

There's another version of the film here, with a new musical score from Ben Model.