The sky was limitless

Ric BURNS, well-known for hyper-articulate volubility, sits still and listens hard to a woman who is telling him what she thinks about footage near the end of his new documentary, “The Center of the World,” a history of the World Trade Center. She’s Lynn Novick, a producer who usually works with Burns’ filmmaking brother, Ken, but Ric has asked her to critique 30 minutes of horrifying footage in which buildings that dominate the previous two hours come down.

He screens a sequence of bodies tumbling rapidly through the air to their deaths, victims when the towers burned two years ago; it’s a more extended compilation of such falls than TV viewers have seen to date. Novick, who lived through 9/11 in Manhattan, urges that he be guided by the amount of footage viewers have seen before.

“One person jumping is plenty. Why two people? The rest of the world didn’t see anything that showed all that,” she adds. In the end, restraint gave way to other priorities. He showed about six people falling, giving the “plentitude of the event,” in keeping with an overall aesthetic that a fellow producer who admires Burns notes “is clearly not minimalist.” Airing at 9 p.m. Monday on KCET and other PBS stations, the three-hour film offers the culminating eighth episode of Burns’ monumental series about New York. “Let’s face it, the reason it is being made is 9/11,” he says. “But it is not a film about 9/11.”

It is a cradle-to-grave biography of how the World Trade Center “sort of drifted into being the world’s tallest building,” in the ambivalent on-screen description of New Yorker magazine architecture critic Paul Goldberger, whose skeptical yet passionate eloquence typifies the film’s portrayal of what Goldberger ends up calling “martyred buildings.” It is a film whose immersive focus revels in the sheer physicality of the buildings, using archival footage and interviews with historians, politicians and people who led the towers’ construction. In an America that some observers argue has only reluctantly considered a relationship between 9/11 and how this country has used its power in the world, the film bears a surprising undertow of skepticism about the price of globalism and gigantism.

Ric Burns’ admirers speak of him as the Burns whose work -- including the “The Donner Party,” which wove a disastrous voyage to California into another epic about the price of empire -- tends toward a darker view of history. In interviews, he says that the overpowering shock of 9/11 stemmed in part from how “New Yorkers think of ourselves as the center of the world and expect to have some special dispensation from the world’s problems,” how Americans thought they could enjoy “a globalism with airplanes and the Internet and without violence or politics.”

The film sometimes echoes this critical tone, but Burns says he wanted to show how the buildings meant “many different things to different people,” the slide from dismissal to acceptance among many New Yorkers. Structurally, he says, a big challenge was connecting two stories, the absorbing one of the towers’ construction -- then, the stunning cataclysm. He took careful measure of an audience that knows a lot about 9/11, which he calls “the most watched event in human history.”

The destruction of the buildings’ story became “a vortex” toward which the film had to move as relentlessly as “water moves toward Niagara Falls before going over the edge.”

Postwar genesis

That historical flow continues for nearly an hour before the actual building starts. As World War II yields to the Cold War, the World Trade Center notion glimmers surprisingly early, in 1946. New York’s shipping industry fades, as does the centrality of lower Manhattan; the mighty Rockefellers get involved. Guy Tozzoli, top manager for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, tells how “lower Manhattan, which I’ll describe as the two square miles from Chambers Street down to the Battery, was dying. Companies were moving out, either to mid-Manhattan or really out of New York City ....and so David [Rockefeller] had an idea. Why not create, using the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a ‘world trade center’ -- whatever that was?”

Nelson Rockefeller becomes governor of New York. Public and private power coalesces in controversial ways. “It wasn’t about consensus back in those days,” New York Times reporter James Glanz observes. “It was about a very powerful agency [the Port Authority] knowing how to get its way, busting through all obstacles, all objections, no matter how valid.”

The towers become, Burns’ documentary argues, symbols of wrongheaded hugeness at a time when the 1970s recession was savaging New York -- so out of place do they seem, in fact, that New York Mayor John Lindsay skips the opening ceremony.

Later, of course, comes the economic boom of the 1980s and ‘90s, the mammoth towers filled with paying tenants, and bigness is in. The film ends with the camera pulling beyond the Statue of Liberty to show a poignant void where the buildings stood.

Judy Crighton, the retired executive producer of PBS’ “The American Experience” franchise and a consultant to Burns on his New York series, said that he uses 9/11 as a “subtle magnet,” but one doesn’t have to know that to see how he plays with expectations. The sudden appearance of a jet streaking over the city early in the film, the flight of a bird against a bright tower wall, shock a viewer’s memory of 9/11 to life as sharply as a creaking stair in a horror movie -- foreshadowing the winged attacks on that day. When someone proudly says that no ironworkers died during construction, one remembers the workers who later did.

“What other building could you look at and watch a pigeon fly across the frame and be startled?” Burns wonders. “There is a powerful, poetic tyranny that the World Trade Center now has as an object that is almost an engine for creating associations, foreshadowing, ironic backward looks.”

A transcendent tightrope

The same sense of knowing the end and watching the river of images work forward operates when Burns stitches triumphal flight to potential falling in the drama of Aug. 7, 1974, when the young French aerialist Philippe Petit -- in the narrator’s words -- “stepped out onto the slender, thrumming wire that stretched out across the immense shimmering void.”

Petit became, in the words of columnist Pete Hamill, “the first person to humanize these things,” and Petit emerges as a lyrical poet of his remarkable experience, describing his ambition to “become a bird,” a Promethean figure stealing inspiration from the height and ambition of modern engineering.

“They were alive,” Petit says of the buildings. “Not many people know that. The people who built them know that. They were ... vibrating with the passage of a cloud over the sun, difference of temperature, the wind.”

“You can not see Philippe Petit out there and not think he is the man who didn’t fall,” Burns says. Watching horror shift to wonder in the crowds beneath the towers, heads bent back to see the dark moving speck on the wire, one can’t help but recall the turn from wonder to absolute horror on the faces looking up on 9/11.

The narrator calls Petit’s walk “the most sublime and transcendent episode in the 40-year history of the World Trade Center,” and it feels like the emotional center of this film. Yet Petit belongs to a lineup of exceptional figures -- Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, historian Ken Jackson and others -- that never makes room for people who actually lived and died in the buildings. To this, Burns says that he made his film against a background of many others that have focused on the workers in the buildings, the firefighters, those spared and lost on 9/11.

He argues that the philosopher kings of his film were the right sources for a longer view. “People think of newspapers and TV as the first draft of history, and that first draft has been written more brilliantly and more powerfully than any event that has been told. We’re writing the second draft. A year or two have gone by and people have had a time to reflect and, in the tone of Mario Cuomo and Philippe Petit, you are hearing people who understand that time has begun to move on, if only a little bit.

“Paul Goldberger talks about the tides of normalcy that are beginning to return. People are beginning to understand that it is beginning to be history, and we are trying to make a film that presides over that crucial next step.”

*

‘American Experience: The Center of the World’

When: Monday, 9 p.m.

Where: KCET

Rating: The network has rated the film TVPG (may be unsuitable for young children).

Production credits: Director, Ric Burns; producers, Marilyn Ness, Burns; writers, James Sanders, Burns.

Narrator: David Ogden Stiers