Alternate title: A Love Phantasy
Maker: Warren A. Newcombe
Original format: 35mm silent film 1.33:1
New Music: Donald Sosin
Courtesy: Museum of Modern Art
Technical note: Visible artifacts reflect poor duplication of film now considered "lost."

Warren Newcombe's The Enchanted City sits in the pantheon of early pioneer attempts to create a pure art cinema in America. Shot using a secret animation technique known as the "Newcombe process," his first art film was preceded in 1922 by the New York City premieres of Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's New York the Magnificent aka Manhatta and Dudley Murphy's The Soul of the Cypress. Newcombe's film was favorably reviewed by the New York Times for its "compositions of masses and lines, expressively shaded and lighted" and recommended "you just look at the different scenes as you would view pictures in a gallery."

Warren A. Newcombe (1894-1960) went on to head the special effects department at MGM studio, win two Academy Awards for Best Special Effects, and work on over 200 Hollywood feature films. Earlier in 1920-21 and in collaboration with Neil E. McGuire ("Moonland"), he invented and made use many times of the Newcombe process, simply described as scroll paintings of fantastic mythical backgrounds combined with live action photography. The most famous of which are those shimmering process shots of the Emerald City seen in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939). -Bruce Posner