Ken Burns - The Brooklyn
Bridge
Director:
Ken Burns
Year: 1981
Rating: 6.0
When I was a working man living in Brooklyn, there
were many days especially in spring and fall where I would wake up an hour
early and walk to my job in lower Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge. Avoiding
the crowded subways was part of it but simply walking across this bridge
was always an exhilarating experience no matter how many times I had made
this same sojourn. You feel like you are walking across history, across a
work of art as much as a way to get across a river. It filled me with the
glory of what man can do, of a period when America did great things and built
monuments to last. Off in the distance you could see the Statue of Liberty
welcoming the world to our shores, down below seagulls flew with grace as
they paid homage to the bridge and boats plied the river carrying their loads
and against the bridge was the magnificent skyline of this city rising ever
higher.
In this, Ken Burn's first documentary that only runs about 60 minutes he
goes through the history of its building. It was for its time an astonishing
achievement - higher than any building in America, longer than any bridge
in the world, built basically by hand before they had phones or electrical
equipment - but above all it was magnificent in its style and grace. It took
fourteen years to build from 1869 to 1883 and in effect it killed both the
engineers who imagined it and built it. It was planned by John Roebling who
had already built a few smaller suspension bridges but while surveying for
this one he was killed in an accident. His son Washington who had built bridges
for the Union army took over and got it underway. It was incredibly complicated
and beyond my feeble understanding, but they had to set these enormous caissons
down into the water to sink and set on bedrock and fill it with cement. Washington
worked in it as it sank over 100 feet down and got the bends and became an
invalid. He never set foot on the bridge again but was able to supervise
it from his apartment high up in Brooklyn Heights. Eventually his sickness
killed him but not until the bridge was complete and his wife became the
first person to walk across it. The film is narrated by David McCullough
who wrote a non-fiction book about the Brooklyn Bridge in 1972.
Many years later in 1924 Hart Crane rented the same room that Roebling had
watched his bridge slowly ascend to the heavens and wrote his famous poem
To Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge has been adored in films, paintings, photographs
and simply people staring up at it from below. I have many times.
How many dawns, chill from his rippling
rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot
him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building
high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our
eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day ...
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing
scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet
left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,
--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon
leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks
turn ...
Thy cables, breathe the North Atlantic
still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring
strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--
Again the traffic lights that skim thy
swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of
stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine
arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year...
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming
sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
