RFD Greenwich Village

RFD Greenwich Village

Although the hippie ideal was fading in the late 1960s, marketers kept it alive. The Greenwich Village of RFD Greenwich Village is filled with "countrified cosmopolitans" who, while they appear to be beyond work and money worries, belong to a Bohemian subculture (which never looked anything like this). This representation of Manhattan is a tweak on Mayor John V. Lindsay's early-sixties "Fun City." From the film's narration: "Village life is cosmopolitan, yet relaxed and carefree. Pleasure is found in just being alive. Suburban living, on an urban landscape. A time to pursue personal pleasures, to find self-expression in comfortable clothing." The film's title, referring to a suburban experience within the boundaries of the city, is apt: "In the shadows of modern Manhattan, surrounded by glass and steel, yet only a subway stop away from the seething city, with its crowds of people, hectic workday schedules, and the office routine . . . lies the sleepy village called Greenwich. A suburban oasis where one can gather thoughts and enjoy the wonders of nature or saunter through winding streets. . . . Here thousands of people live in an atmosphere much like the one they left in their own hometown." The film is a soft sell for cotton, except for a single moment when soft sell becomes hard sell, and we are reminded who is behind the film: the camera zooms into the fabric of a corduroy coat worn by a woman at a sidewalk cafe. "Free from conservative business attire," the narrator tells us, "the modern Villager finds comfort in cotton corduroy, the fabric woven for the now generation." The world of RFD Greenwich Village, like the cotton clothes it showcases, is rather boring. An artificial sex- and drug-free environment created by an advertiser, it is a scene without an edge and looks a lot like the suburbia it purports to escape. Even the nightlife, which is supposed to be "a world of contradiction, of paradoxes in life," is pretty tedious. There is nothing really to do. The

https://archive.org/details/0574_RFD_Greenwich_Village_08_01_00_24 · Public domain (Internet Archive)