A promising Bill Moyers two-part show on the Hudson River:
April 23, 2002
Charting a Course of Negligence and Splendor
By JULIE SALAMON
Bill Moyers could have become irrelevant in a television landscape overcome with documentary sprawl. But he continues to distinguish himself, like an architectural gem left standing in the middle of an industrial park. He believes in making his points (many of them), but he also appreciates the eccentric byways that make an intellectual journey pleasurable as well as purposeful.
Tonight and tomorrow, in "America's First River: Bill Moyers on the Hudson," he and his producers offer a richly textured vision of a river's effect on a country's history, art, literature and environmental politics. This four-hour documentary uses as its central metaphor the Native American name for the Hudson, Muhheakunnuk: loosely, "the river that flows both ways." Its scientific designation, less poetic but easier to pronounce, is estuary, the place where salty tides meet freshwater currents.
It's also the place where aesthetic and spiritual appreciations of natural beauty have met corporate indifference and human wastefulness. This elegantly photographed work offers a bounty of glorious images, as well as disturbing visions of garbage, PCB's and other contaminants that almost destroyed the 315-mile river.
The documentary evokes what the Hudson River has meant to a wide variety of people, symbolically and as a practical matter. "I felt dizzy, as though my senses were drowning," gushed Fanny Kemble, a British actress and travel writer, describing a steamboat ride up the Hudson River in the 1830's. "I felt as though I had been carried into the immediate presence of God."
The natural splendor may have been divine, but Kemble found the hurly-burly of New York City crowds traveling with her to be overwhelming. She wrote, "They live all their lives in a throng, take pleasure in droves and travel in swarms."
One person's throng is another's idea of civilization, and people who live along the Hudson can't avoid contending with the dilemma. Some painters of the Hudson River School solved the problem simply by eliminating the boats and people from their landscapes, unless the landscape itself was the problem. When Frederic Edwin Church observed an incredible sunset over Hoboken from his Greenwich Village studio, he transplanted it to a pristine (and uninhabited) mountain lake in a painting called "Twilight in the Wilderness."
So it has gone with the river that begins in "the immediate presence of God" (a k a the Adirondacks) but ends in Manhattan. Its location explains why this smallish river ? 71st among United States rivers ? has had such a huge influence on American culture and politics. The river that runs both ways is full of paradoxes: the country's wealthy industrialists helped tempt the river's ruination, then became its saviors when they built castles on its magnificent bluffs and decided nature was worth preserving. (One such heir, Laurance S. Rockefeller, is one of this documentary's underwriters.)
Mr. Moyers allows people to speak, not blurt. So the documentary builds on unexpected stories, from fishermen and art historians, military experts and environmentalists, businessmen and writers. They are filmed in canoes, museums, at West Point, in elegant mansions and in the woods, all these different settings linked by the river.
One of the most surprising and delightful segments is a rumination about Troy, N.Y., situated on the river, one of the sooty upstate cities adorned with classical Greek names. It includes Richard Seltzer, a writer who trained as a doctor, who recalls his father's taking him to visit one of Troy's most beautiful structures, the local crematorium. The boy asked his father what happened to the smoke that drifted out of the tower. Did they eat it when it fell on their fruits and vegetables? Mr. Seltzer's father didn't answer, leaving the boy to make his own conclusion. "If we are what we eat," he says, "why then I am Troy."
That notion resonates with Hudson River fishermen, recalling the 1970's, when industrial waste had so fouled the river that even the most luscious-looking fish was suspect. Mr. Moyers talks to the people who have been instrumental in the river's cleanup. He also talks to those who helped pollute it.
Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric , refuses to accept condemnation on G.E.'s behalf and says he resents the government's order that the company has to clean up the mess it made by dumping millions of pounds of chemicals into the river.
The documentary exquisitely connects past and present. Mr. Moyers tells a story of early tourism in the Adirondacks. In the 19th century a group of women sketching nature were shocked to hear the sound of axes chopping wood. But they were also guests at luxury hotels and camps that had to be built out of something. Their predicament feels very familiar.
"How much of nature do we consume to sustain the good life?" asks Mr. Moyers. "And how much do we leave alone?"
AMERICA'S FIRST RIVER
Bill Moyers on the Hudson
On most PBS stations tonight and tomorrow night (check local listings)
Felice Firestone, executive producer; Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes, senior producers. Producers and directors, Monica Lange and Tom Spain (Part 1); Mr. Casciato and Ms. Hughes (Part 2). Bill Moyers and Judith Davidson Moyers, executive editors. Editor, Linda Starr Spain (Part 1); Andrew Fredericks (Part 2). Judith Davidson Moyers and Judy Doctoroff O'Neill, executives in charge; Deborah Rubenstein, executive director of special projects. Produced by Public Affairs Television. Presented by WNET, New York. |
