Brooklyn sure isn't what it used to be. The New York City borough has famously become gentrified through the years, ushering in new kinds of development and residents.
We've seen what that looks like in real life, but what does it look like on screen? Many movies and TV shows have taken place in Brooklyn over the decades, from The Honeymooners to Saturday Night Fever to most recently Girls. They have all brought their own perspective on the people, places and attitudes of the borough.
Now we can see this evolution play out on screen. Joel Fernando, a New York-based underground filmmaker and experimental audio/visual communicator, has created a four-minute film for Slate about the changing face of Brooklyn on camera, aptly titled Brooklyn: Through the Lens.
The clip moves from the 1940s to the 2000s and gives us a glimpse of Brooklyn's various portrayals through the decades. The interesting thing about how Fernando grouped the clips, however, is that he arranged them by where the films take place rather than when they were made. That means Frank Sinatra's 1947 movie musical It Happened in Brooklyn is placed right alongside 2013's Jackie Robinson biopic 42. This creates a fascinating anachronistic clash between how filmmakers viewed Brooklyn then and what their presentist view of it is now.
As we move through time, you'll see Henry Hill grow up in the 1950s in Goodfellas, Gene Hackman's Jimmy Doyle fly through the 1970s Brooklyn streets in that classic car chase from The French Connection and Cliff Huxtable teach his children a heartwarming lesson on a 1980s-era episode of The Cosby Show. There's also plenty of Spike Lee joints in this compilation, since the director often sets his movies in the borough, such as 1989's Do the Right Thing.
But will you see any of Manhattan in this super-cut? Fuhgeddaboudit.
