Reconstructed from the B-roll of 1970s New York films, Song of My City resurrects a lost NYC and reveals how a filmmaker turns cinema into an immortal self-portrait
1970s New York has been mythologised more than perhaps any other city in American cinema. Films by Scorsese, Lumet and Friedkin turned the city’s grit, danger and electricity into a kind of urban legend. But no documentary has ever rebuilt that lost New York entirely from its cinematic remnants until Song of My City, premiering at Telluride and arriving on HBO Max.
A found-footage documentary constructed entirely from the B-roll of 1970s NYC films, Song of My City is a cinematic resurrection. It pulls from the discarded frames, the transitional shots and the background moments that once gave texture to classics like Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. The film distils “the frenetic energy, neon-lit loneliness, and inadvertent beauty of a city on the brink of collapse.”
What emerges is not simply a portrait of New York. It is a reconstruction of a myth and a remarkably personal act of self-creation.
Roberts’ approach places him in direct conversation with a lineage of found-footage innovators. He cites Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog and Christian Marclay’s The Clock as inspirations. He also draws from the city symphonies of the 1920s, particularly Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, borrowing its day-in-the-life structure while subverting it. Instead of documentary reality, he assembles a metropolis made entirely of film.
The decision to use only B-roll is transformative. These are the frames that typically disappear. The street corners without plot, traffic without context, lights flickering above unnamed characters. By elevating the background to the foreground, Roberts uncovers a New York that existed only in the cinematic unconscious of the era.
And beneath this ambitious reconstruction lies something more intimate.
Roberts explains that he grew up in Alabama imagining New York, like many of us, long before he ever saw it. “I had never set foot in the City or was even alive in the ’70s,” he writes, “but I knew its gritty streets through the lens of Scorsese, Lumet and others.”
Those films shaped the earliest version of himself as the boy who believed in New York before he understood it, the future filmmaker formed by other people’s images. Now, facing terminal illness and living in the city of his childhood dreams, Roberts turns back to the footage that created him.
By stitching together B-roll from films that once ignited his imagination, Roberts is not only resurrecting a lost NYC. He is creating an immortal version of himself, as a self built from the cinematic ghosts that shaped his identity.
This is the emotional engine of Song of My City. Where the body cannot be preserved, the imagination can, and where life is finite, cinema is immortal.
The documentary then becomes a self-portrait written in images rather than memory, a biography constructed from the cultural DNA that formed him. Found footage becomes found self.
Visually, the film is hypnotic. Grain, scratches and imperfect exposures become aesthetic signatures rather than flaws. The soundtrack, featuring The Velvet Underground, Philip Glass and Gene Krupa, binds the footage into a rhythmic portrait of a city alive with contradictions.
This strategy gives Song of My City a distinct place in today’s documentary landscape. In an era dominated by digital clarity, algorithmic curation and hyper-produced nonfiction, Roberts embraces the analogue, the damaged, the discarded. His New York exists in the slippage between frames. It’s there in the residue of a film culture that shaped global perceptions of the city.
Importantly, the film also reframes the 1970s not as a factual decade, but as a cinematic construct. The New York we recognise, neon, danger, glamour, ruin, is a cinematic invention. Roberts honours that invention by treating cinema itself as historical archive and emotional truth.
For cinephiles, the film is a treasure chest of 1970s New York imagery. For New Yorkers, it is a portrait of the city’s most mythic era. For HBO Max audiences, it offers a rare fusion: film history, found footage experimentation and personal essay filmmaking.
But for Roberts, it is something deeper. It is the chance to leave behind the version of himself that cinema once created. The boy in Alabama who fell in love with a place he had never seen becomes, through this film, the man who gives that imagined city back to the world
There is a quiet ache running beneath every sequence. The viewer feels the tension between the New York Roberts imagined as a child and the New York he finally inhabits. The film becomes a way of reconciling these two selves as the dreamer and the man confronting the limits of time.
His mortality does not overshadow the film. Instead, it sharpens its purpose. In rebuilding the city that built him, Roberts ensures he will remain inside it, not physically, but mythically.
A filmmaker becomes immortal when his imagination becomes part of the cultural archive.
Song of My City is that archive, and through the images that outlive us, a part of us continues to breathe.
Viva sempre.
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