No one will want to miss two important documentaries that will air this week.
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washingtonpost.com
TWO YEARS : 'The Center of the World'
A Stirring Biography Of Tragedy's Towers
By Alona Wartofsky
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, September 8, 2003; Page C01
"The Center of the World," a three-hour documentary on the World Trade Center that airs tonight at 8 on Channels 22 and 26, feels like two separate films.
The first section details the history of the World Trade Center, from its conception in the months following World War II, and its controversial development and arduous construction, to its awkward arrival in the early '70s in a city facing a severe fiscal crisis. All of which is interesting.
But the second section, which examines the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the twin towers, is riveting. Like other unimaginably horrible episodes in history, the loss of 2,792 lives in the towers that morning loses none of its impact in the retelling. Two years later, watching the planes crash into the towers and the buildings' eventual collapse is devastating. Even more wrenching, if that is possible, is the footage of men who jump to escape the inferno, their bodies twisting and their jackets flapping as they fall.
What happened that morning irrevocably changed New York and the rest of America, and it's impossible to view the rest of the film without thinking of it. In a way, that works against the first section.
Ric Burns, who directed and co-wrote this documentary as the final installment of public television's "New York: A Documentary Film" series, does his best to inject dramatic tension into the entire film. "The Center of the World" spans more than 50 years of history, starting when banker David Rockefeller conceived the project as a way to both proclaim America's global economic dominance and to reverse the decline of lower Manhattan.
But the great ambitions and hubris of the Rockefellers, as well as the political machinations required to bring the project to realization, are overshadowed by more contemporary events. The horrible knowledge of what lies ahead is distracting from the very start: The film opens with an exploration of the symbolism of the World Trade Center, and it's not until nearly a quarter of an hour into it that someone specifically mentions the loss of lives. The documentary is peppered with comments and analysis from a range of people, mostly historians, journalists, politicians. Many of their remarks are insightful and interesting. Some are banal and others so ludicrous that they surely were taken out of context. Journalist William Langewiesche points out that only buildings that were part of the World Trade Center complex were completely destroyed; what could he possibly have meant by describing this as "almost a sad poetic justice"?
Not surprisingly, the historians are more insightful than the journalists (notable exceptions are New York Times reporter James Glanz and architecture critics Paul Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable). But among the interviews, it is the recollections of people who actually worked on the buildings that prove most compelling. During a segment on the construction of the towers, structural engineer Leslie Robertson describes the tests he conducted on them. "One of my jobs was to look at all the possible events that might take place in a high-rise building," he recalls. He describes how he anticipated "aircraft impact," using a low-flying, slow-flying 707, the largest jet of that time. He concluded the building would "suffer," but it would remain standing. "What we didn't look at is . . . what happens to all that fuel," he says sadly. "Perhaps we could be faulted for that, for not doing so, but we didn't."
More than a quarter of an hour is devoted to French high-wire artist Philippe Petit's 1974 illegal sallies across a 1-inch wire cable he and two cohorts suspended between the two towers. That event, along with the opening of the popular Windows on the World restaurant and the observation deck, seemed to change the way many New Yorkers viewed the WTC. "It was fabulous that this guy had done this. He made the towers belong, if you will, to New York," says Guy Tozzoli, who served as the director in charge of the planning, construction, rental and operation of the World Trade Center, and is currently the president of the World Trade Centers Association.
The film may overstate the importance of Petit's daring performance, and elsewhere the narration is marred by an overabundance of superlatives. (Every turning point, it seems, is "crucial," while transformations are all "remarkable.") Even more annoying is the soundtrack, which here and there bears an unfortunate resemblance to the music from "Titanic."
And in a way, "The Center of the World" faults New Yorkers for not anticipating the events of Sept. 11, though surely responsibility belongs to federal security agencies rather than your average schlub on Second Avenue. Similarly, its oft-repeated assertion that "globalization" led to the attacks is too vague, too simplistic an explanation for the attack, whose perpetrators are never specifically mentioned.
The World Trade Center may have been conceived as a proud symbol of capitalism and global dominance. Our enemies may have viewed it as the epitome of an evil and corrupt political system.
But after Sept. 11, for many of us it will represent precious lives lost and the selfless bravery exhibited by people who may have seemed perfectly ordinary prior to that day. "We lost all those firemen. We lost police," former governor Mario Cuomo says shortly before the film's conclusion. "We had this fantastic contradiction of people who hated you so much that they were willing to give up their life to take yours, and people who loved humanity so much that they were willing to run into the darn building in the smoke and flames, just to save the life of somebody they never met."
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Why the Towers Fell
Shown on PBS Tuesday 9:00 PM PDT
pbs.org |
