The September 11th attack
Themes of N.Y. film ring true after tragedy
Associated Press
No way could Ric Burns have seen it coming several years back, when he began "New York: A Documentary Film." No way could he have imagined it in November 1999, when the first five chapters of this epic urban portrait reached the air.
Associated Press
Who did? Not Burns, looking ahead to tonight and tomorrow, when the final chapters of "New York" air on PBS, taking his viewers on the last leg of his grand tour: from the Crash of 1929 to the soaring promise of the new millennium.
Although filmmaker Ric Burns' New York documentary has changed since the attacks, he says the central truths remain intact.
By Sept. 11, the program was done, all 4 1/2 hours of it. It would stay that way. But Burns knew his film, while the same, was also different. When the World Trade Center fell prey to terrorists, taking thousands of victims to their deaths, he knew the film had changed retroactively, right under his nose.
He knew one other thing: that the central truths of his film are intact.
"What better place for terrorists to strike?" says Burns in a shoulda-seen-it-coming tone. "Ground zero of a global commercial culture for 400 years, since the Dutch got here. A culture that goes everywhere, involves everyone in it, and from which some people wish to secede."
8 p.m. today, 9 p.m. tomorrow, KHET (PBS)
Introduced in a harsh new world of fear and full alert, the film brings perspective to why people everywhere have long understood, even without knowing that they know, that the human experience is bound in New York's destiny. Wherever you are watching it, "New York" leaves you with a deeper sense of why, these days, you also feel the city's pain.
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'New York: A Documentary'
Airing tonight, "The City of Tomorrow" covers 1929 to 1945, years dominated by two New York giants: the beloved, whirlwind Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and urban uber-builder Robert Moses, who, with his highways, parks, bridges and public housing, was both masterful and maniacal in his campaign to create a bold new city.
Tomorrow, "The City and the World" explores the social, economic and physical forces that swept through the city after World War II, culminating with New York's miraculous revival from the fiscal crisis of the '60s and '70s that, after four centuries, seemed to sound the city's death knell.
"I think our series is less a history of the city than a historically structured meditation on urban values," says Burns, best known for the PBS documentary "The Civil War" that he produced with his brother, Ken.
"Every theme we learned in the making of the film has now taken on a new and extremely urgent meaning," Burns said.
