filming the streets of the city in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic

ARTE – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY

When Paris was strictly confined, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, we thought of the very stylized empty drawings that Pierre Le-Tan (1950-2019) for his work Paris of my youth (Aubier, 1988; new enriched edition, Stock, 2019). When it was New York’s turn to shut down, we thought of the drawings that Sempé, recently deceasedrendered for the covers of The New Yorker (one hundred and twelve, from 1978, nine years after Le-Tan, who also collaborated successfully with the very select weekly).

Unlike his colleague, Sempé will have experienced the pandemic, but his collaboration with The New Yorker had ceased since 2019, and his eye and trait were apparently not required during that time. But lots of drawings – this little man in snowy, deserted Manhattan; this cyclist riding alone on the Brooklyn Bridge… – give such a poetic image of the occasional vacancy of this high and long city.

A social report

Tom Bergmann, author of the documentary New York in the time of Covid (2022), posed his camera in the streets of the city, usually teeming, and filmed the very strange lethargy by which this metropolis, constrained and forced like so many others in the world, was won over. It’s obviously fascinating in itself, and even more so for those familiar with the city.

Bergmann has made a very poetic film without, however, delighting in a Durassian observation on the mode “his Covid name in deserted Manhattan”… Because his work is above all a social report: one quickly takes the measure of it in the premises of a company of funeral directors which buries, one after the other, the members of poor families of the Bronx ( caution: hard and unblurred images).

Behind the sounds of a young black violinist playing in the street – when it was possible to get off there again – lurked a social drama. When Daniel Boulud, one of the commercially successful French restaurateurs based in New York, talks about his staff, whom he had to fire but wants to protect, or his elderly parents whom he cannot visit in France, the return of the real is very… real.

An African-American mathematics teacher, Jabari Brisport, a victorious candidate for the New York State Senate elections, gives lessons by videoconference to his students, but worries that one of them is absent, left to bury a loved one in the Caroline Islands (south of the Philippines) and whose family was evicted from their accommodation during his absence. “School was, eight hours a day, a reassuring environment, and the student I’m thinking of doesn’t even have that anymore”laments Jabari Brisport.

After the great sleep of the city, Tom Bergmann films its gradual awakening: a countertenor sings the “Death of Dido”, from Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell, on the banks of the river, in front of a golden sunset; a music teacher can finally scatter her father’s ashes in the ocean, in front of the building where he lived in Brighton Beach; Daniel Boulud sets up a terrace in the summer, then tents in the winter, in front of his flagship restaurant; Chinatown finally celebrates the Chinese New Year… New York has known others. And reborn, once again.

New York in the time of Covidby Tom Bergmann (EU-Ger., 2022, 82 min) Available on Arte.tv until December 4.

Renaud Machart