Newburgh: Beauty and Tragedy

Newburgh: Beauty and Tragedy is a documentary film about a small city an hour north of Manhattan, whose Hudson River views, historic buildings and rising gentrification contrast sharply and iconically with the crumbling, low-income, crime-ridden, predominantly black neighborhood and the long, grinding hollowing out at its heart.

In 1952, Look magazine listed Newburgh as an “All American City;” in 2019, USA Today ranked it among the 50 worst cities in the United States. Newburgh’s decline is emblematic of a broader decline of thousands of other cities and towns across the country -- left behind by economic and social trends, largely forgotten and ignored by wealthier neighbors, yet rich in a sense of place, community and pathos that are deep, essential parts of the American psyche, albeit suppressed.

The film tells downtown Newburgh’s story through interviews with longtime residents, but it's much more than just a POV documentary. It’s an unflinching, compelling exploration of a place surrounding communities have long ignored and denied. It reveals Newburgh’s troubles and beauties alike in its unforgettable faces, once gracious ruined buildings and street scenes, in an overcrowded home, a soup kitchen, a prisoner re-entry program. It vividly evokes the lives and voices of Newburgh residents, who talk unguardedly and poignantly on camera, some of whom Kasterine had previously photographed for years. Still portraits of the subjects at earlier points in their lives contrast with the later interviews, conveying their uncompromising gazes, and a sense of both intimacy and distance.

The film is also a complex meditation on the camera bearing witness and building two-way bridges across racial, economic and cultural divides. Kasterine couldn’t be more different from the film’s subjects -- white, born in England in 1932, an elite photographer connected with celebrities, and a resident of a prosperous Hudson Valley town across the River. Not only did he find an entrée and welcome as an outsider, returning to Newburgh over 22 years to take stills and get to know residents, but some of the film’s subjects ended up helping make it, operating camera and sound equipment themselves.

Some will find it troubling when a white, relatively privileged filmmaker like Kasterine swoops in to portray life in a poor community of color, without directly thematizing or accounting for his own outsider or privileged status. Yet what’s unique about the film is how powerfully the residents and images of Newburgh speak for themselves, and not only because some of them helped make the film. They interpellate the viewer just as powerfully as the camera fixes them as subjects of the film.

Instead of implicit privilege or racism in the camera’s gaze, Newburgh: Beauty and Tragedy thematizes and surpasses the privilege and racism implicit in turning one’s gaze away from the thousands of Newburghs woven deeply into the unraveling fabric of 21st century American life. Kasterine is an artist, and his film is a multivalent, aesthetic document, not a manifesto about politics or racism. Yet it raises deep issues, and has the potential to start a new cultural conversation about politics, race and film.