 |
|
| |
||||
From the "On The Scene" Archives: 
by Amy Goodman (01.23.00) Marc Singer holds on a pedestal the people who most New Yorkers strive to ignore -- people who the NYPD herd into oblivion, who commuters walk on, who endure Gotham life below millions of tons of cement.
"I had no intention of making a film at the outset, when I first went underground," says the British-born director when asked about the origin of "Dark Days." Nearly a decade ago at the age of seventeen, Singer left his misspent youth in London behind and wound up in Manhattan, where he immediately noticed the then highly visible homeless population. Between occasional modeling gigs, he started hanging around with some of the homeless who lived in his neighborhood, befriending them and also observing from close range the misinformed disdain and constant cruelty inflicted upon them. He started hearing wild rumors about the tunnel squatting communities and six months later, his curiosity piqued, he ventured underground, eventually focusing his attention on just one tunnel that stretches north from Penn Station past Harlem. Instead of the cannibalistic sub-human race lurking in Gotham's bowels popularized in urban myth, Singer found a handful of troubled, endearing people with a humbling ability to survive. "It's a dump down there," Singer says, "pitch black, rats running around everywhere, garbage, and smells that make your eyes water. When I first went down there, I was amazed and awed; I had so much respect for everybody and I kept thinking, 'Could I have done this or would I have let myself go to pieces?" Bound by common experience (family tragedies, drug addiction, and the basic human search for shelter, food, and love) the homeless friends Singer made in the tunnel inspired his powerful social-working instinct. Perhaps, he thought, an in-depth, insider's view of these individuals would help change negative perceptions of the homeless. Most importantly, he hypothesized, if he made a movie about life in the tunnel, gave every homeless person involved in its making a percentage, and if that movie made a profit, he could provide them with decent housing. The only thing that stood in the way of Singer's idea and its execution was that he knew absolutely nothing about filmmaking, or even still photography. "The truth is," Singer admits with a naughty grin, "if I ever picked up a camera in my life it was a little disposable throw-away one."
Giddy with pride in his auto-didactic team, Singer explains, "Everybody had a job according to what they had done before, or were good at, or that I could adapt to film. Like Henry - before he was homeless, he laid track on the railroads. So I said to him, 'Can you build me something that we can move down that track that people can push?' The next morning, I woke up and found him burning holes through wood because we didn't have a drill and he's got a shopping cart and he's building the dolly that ran on the tracks." The carefully composed, stark black and white Super 16mm film shot underground with severely limited light looks more like the work of a technical sophisticate than that of a handful of homeless people none of whom had ever loaded a camera. "We figured out after a few days of shooting that you need a lot of light for film," Singer says. "I shot one little roll of test footage on a reversal camera and it didn't come out, and somebody said, 'No, that's what the F stop is for.'" For electricity, the crew found a wire, tapped into it, and ran about thirty blocks worth of power all the way down the tunnel, "So anywhere we were, if something happened we could plug in the camera and have light." Within 3 weeks, Singer had a full working crew, a fact worth considering by anyone contemplating film school. "They'd say, 'Where do you want to shoot tonight?' And I'd say, 'Why don't we go down there? I want to get a shot of that happening.' By the time I get there, lights are ready, camera's loaded, sound is ready. Fun crew." The film's urban wasteland aesthetic is sort of Lynchian (think "Eraserhead") in its ironic beauty. "It looks a hell of a lot worse down there than I could show because of my inexperience with film," Singer insists, but the deep blackness does not hide the supreme filth; it leaves to the imagination the profound misery and endless piles of waste that loom in the darkness. "I want to tell you that aesthetically I made decisions for this reason or that reason," he says, "but really that wasn't the case. When I decided to do this movie, somebody told me, 'You've got to do it on film.' If they'd have said do it on video I would have done it on video. Then someone said, 'If you shoot in color film and you don't know how to do the lighting you'll fuck it all up,' so I said, 'O.K., I better shoot in black and white. I can fuck it up and it won't matter, it'll still look half-good.'" Singer shot and lived in the tunnel on and off for more than two years and ended up with about 50 hours of footage, "a lot of it crap." Singer taught himself how to edit, and cut the film with editor Melissa Neidich ("Soul in the Hole") for another year and a half, interrupted by long periods of cashlessness. The result of Singer's painstaking process is a dreamlike journey to and from an emotional and physical purgatory. Like many independents, "Dark Days" is the product of believers' generosity - roommates, investors, and vendors who liked Singer and his idea. Kodak, Singer says for example, "gave me as much film as I could carry." Cinevision "literally gave" Marc the camera for two and a half years and taught him how to use it. He borrowed money, sold everything he owned, maxed out about ten credit cards, and to this day, is still squatting in friends' apartments. "Dark Days" is unique among documentaries because while it is not an advocacy film with an overwhelmingly sagging political agenda, the subjects' stories and their sensitive treatment by Singer are testament to more creative, gentler solutions to the problem of homelessness. Singer is more interested in humanity than in politics. "I love people," he says. "I have respect for people. I try to understand people, not to judge them." Asked for his opinion on advocacy in films, Singer says only, "I don't want anybody telling me what to do. I made a very conscious decision to not preach." Despite this ardent objectivism, the film has a surprisingly optimistic, controversial ending, which should add to the currently heated policy debate about homelessness in New York City. Another reason why "Dark Days" is unique is that few people would be willing to abandon comparatively opulent lives on earth to spend so many seasons in what is possibly America's most damnable version of hell. Asked if he had a good time there, Marc Singer said, a nostalgic twinkle in his eye, "I had a great time. I have nothing but good memories. I felt more accepted as a person than I've ever felt when I was down there. I've not felt so accepted since." [Amy Goodman is a New York-based freelance writer and documentary producer, currently working with Moxie Firecracker Films.] | |
