“New York, New York” is the fourth in a series of ten essays, called “Waste”, in which Finnish filmmaker Jan Ijäs explores human waste production, and its meaning in contemporary societies. In an unusual perspective on one of the world’s most filmed cities, Ijäs reveals the subtext adjacent to New York’s current urban fabric, through the many “potter’s fields” that have been a part of it since the 18th century – community cemeteries for poor, indigent and/or unidentified people, which have been successively pushed, at the pace of disasters and disease, towards the fringes of the city. The movie’s final portion introduces another kind of cemetery: Fresh Kills, the world’s largest landfill, currently deactivated, which preserves both the most mundane of domestic waste, and the World Trade Center’s wreckage. By unearthing, in twenty minutes, the strata of three centuries worth of history, “Waste No.4 New York, New York” performs an archeology of western civilization through its human and material remains, while inviting us to review our time from the point of view of a somewhat distant posterity. It is, simultaneously, a “rewind” and a “fast forward”. (IR)