Not long ago, the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns appeared in the doorway of his Upper West Side office with a fresh wound over his forehead. \u201cYou may wonder why I have a two-inch gash on my head,\u201d he said, bowing to display the damage. Burns\u2014the director of \u201cNew York: A Documentary Film\u201d\u2014had had a run-in with a metal paper-towel holder, to the tune of seven stitches. \u201cGeysers of blood,\u201d he said, entering a shadowy editing booth. \u201cI got a photo if you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burns, the younger brother of fellow-filmmaker Ken Burns, was in the midst of making other bloody cuts: editing two long-gestating new episodes of \u201cNew York,\u201d set to air later this month on PBS. One of his editors, Parker Dixon, sat at a console, staring at an iMac screen. The two began to work, Burns thinking aloud, Dixon cuing up footage. \u201cRic puts pen to paper,\u201d Dixon said. \u201cAnd from there we just feel it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burns nodded. \u201cIt\u2019s a funny balance,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes you want to be seeing what you hear, but a whole lot of times you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burns has worked out of the same offices overlooking Broadway and Seventy-third Street since 1989, two years before he and a collaborator, James Sanders, began work on \u201cNew York.\u201d The first seven episodes, fourteen hours in all, aired between 1999 and 2001, covering everything from Henry Hudson\u2019s first sail up the harbor to the city\u2019s near-bankruptcy in the nineteen-seventies. An eighth episode, \u201cThe Center of the World,\u201d three hours long, appeared in 2003, telling the story of the development and construction of the Twin Towers. The two new episodes, \u201cShadows of the Past\u201d and \u201cThe Future of Cities,\u201d cover the past fifty years. As Dixon browsed through shots of Jack Maple (the police official who pioneered CompStat), Michael Bloomberg being sworn in as mayor, Superstorm Sandy walloping the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, footage of Times Square during COVID, and an interview with Eric Adams, Burns said that these were the trickiest installments he\u2019s done. \u201cIt\u2019s in the present,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s becoming history.\u201d<\/p>\n
How is it possible to make sense of a half century of booms and busts, rising and falling crime, skyrocketing inequality, terrorist attacks, waves of new immigrants, revolutionary technologies, divisive new politics, menacing new weather, protests, lockdowns, flowering countercultures, tragic and triumphant Knicks teams, and all the other elements of New York\u2019s relentless change? \u201cIt\u2019s staggering,\u201d Burns said. \u201cWhen it happens all around you in real time, you almost don\u2019t realize it\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new episodes feature a Burnsian mix of carefully chosen images, lyrical voice-over, and cross-spectrum talking heads, including Bloomberg, the history scholar Kenneth T. Jackson, the feminist writer Carmen Boullosa, and the Times culture critic Wesley Morris. Check your doom loops at the door; Burns is a New York City optimist. \u201cThis is where the people are, it\u2019s where the money is, it\u2019s where the productivity is, it\u2019s where the talent is, it\u2019s where the creativity is,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople working hard at every conceivable kind of human enterprise.\u201d For years, he has shot footage of pigeons swooping to and fro in the intersection below his office, known as Verdi Square. \u201cI got a major thing for pigeons,\u201d he said. \u201cPigeons are the New York animals, not rats.\u201d<\/p>\n
Editing is agony for Burns. He grimaced as Dixon skimmed through a segment about the twisty 2001 mayoral race which was being severely truncated. September 11th was a primary day in New York City. Until that morning, Bloomberg had trailed badly in the polls. After the planes hit, officials rescheduled the election. Bloomberg\u2019s victory was arguably a bigger surprise than Zohran Mamdani\u2019s win last year. One case that Burns makes implicitly in the new episodes is that Bloomberg, for all his administration\u2019s faults and blind spots, will go down in history as the signal figure of early-twenty-first-century New York. \u201cThe only prior mayor who was a transformer like that was Fiorello LaGuardia,\u201d Burns said. \u201cAnd Bloomberg had the bigger challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not long ago, the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns appeared in the doorway of his Upper West Side office…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[97134,129284,1472,9,56,63,65,64,11004],"class_list":["post-344894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-_talk-of-the-town","tag-closeup-dept","tag-magazine","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-splitscreenimageleftinset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}