New York: A Documentary Film (1999) (review)

Edgerton | New York: A Documentary Film (1999) Gary R. Edgerton Old Dominion University gedgerto@odu.edu New York:A DocumentaryFilm (1999) A Special Presentation of TheAmerican Experience; PBS, Debut November 14-18 (A Steeplechase Films Production in association with WCBH-TV Boston, Thirteen/WNET-TV New York, and the New-York Historical Society) Rie Burns' epic mini-series, New York: A Documentary explains onscreen: "New York City was founded by the Film chronicles the extraordinary transformation of this one- Dutch and the Dutch didn't give a damn about anything time Dutch colonial outpost to its present-day position asexcept making money." The Dutch are soon displaced from America's preeminent commercial and cultural metropolitan New Amsterdam by the English in 1664, who employ slaves center. Burns learned his craft as an associate producer onwell into the 1740s to build the now renamed New York into two ofhis brother Ken's earlier films, The Statue ofLibertythe third largest commercial metropolis in the British (PBS, 1985) and Huey Long (PBS, 1986), while also pursuing Empire behind only London and Philadelphia, a Ph.D. in English and comparative literatures at ColumbiaBurns often uses New York as a case study t0 suggest University. He eventuallyleft his graduate studies A.B.D. tobroader developments in United States history, such as his co-produce The Civil War(PBS, 1990), before branching out underscoring ofthe city's central role during the larger revoon his own to executive produce and direct Coney Islandlutionary conflict and eventual independence from Britain (PBS, 1991), The Donner Party (PBS, 1992), and The Way West (PBS, 1995), three of the most popular and highly acclaimed programs in the 12-year history of public television's The American Experience series. Lisa Ades, his co-producer for over a decade, previously worked in public affairs programming for WNET-TV in New York. Together they formed Steeplechase Films while preparing Coney Island in 1989, and the five-part, 10-hour scope of New York (so far), is their largest and most ambitious production to date. New York is a study in contrasts, as is common of all of Rie Burns' made-for-television histories. His view is typically one part American dream and the other part American nightmare. Four of the five completed episodes of JVew York, for example, even exhibit this kind of duality in their titles. The first installment, "The Country and the City," basically spans the seaside arrival of Henry Hudson in 1609 through Mayor and later Governor DeWitt Clinton's farsighted gamble of developing and opening the Erie Canal in 1825, thus ensuring that New York would be the nation's most important port from that point onward securing its position as the mercantile hub of the "empire state." As architect Robert A.M. Stern summarizes: "It made New York the only American city that connected Europe on one side with the heartland of the continent on the other." Burns also introduces all the fundamental themes of the series in episode 1, particularly New York's capacities for commerce, democracy, urban transformation, and human ingenuity. As the late New Yorkerwriter Brendan GillTheChrysler Building (top left)wasthetallestman-madestructure intheworld when it was finally finished just prior to the Stock Market Crash in 1929. 76 I Film & History Regular Feature | Film Reviews in 1783: "New York is an American city at last," states the narration. He similarly utilizes New York or one of its more famous sons or daughters as metaphors for the much larger national experience, as when he portrays Alexander Hamilton as the quintessential American immigrant, born out of wedlock in the West Indies, and arriving on the shores of the city as a teenager. Hamilton, like many before and after, literally reinvents himself in New York's streetwise caldron of capitalism and democracy, further converting the city in his own lifetime and later bequeathing his posthumous vision to an America growing increasingly more urban and industrial over the next two centuries. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan aptly concludes: "It is exactly that money-crazy, driving, commercial culture that made political democracy seem perfectly sensible." Episode 2, "Order and Disorder," follows New York from 1825, when it was by then the...