Many of us remember with fear and fascination the subterranean story of the fictional Morlocks, the underground ape-like creatures who accessed the surface world through a series of well structures in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
Though based underground, Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2000) – on tomorrow evening at London' Barbican as part of the "Architecture on Film" series curated by the Architecture Foundation (6.30 pm) – tells the story of a real community living below millions of tons of cement.
The recipient of many awards, Dark Days (note for music fans: soundtrack is courtesy of DJ Shadow) focuses on the homeless people living in the Freedom Tunnel, an abandoned Manhattan railway tunnel stretching from Penn Station past Harlem.
Singer first heard about them after moving from London to New York and, in between modelling gigs, began hanging around with the homeless people in his neighbourhood and eventually decided to descend into Hell to meet the underground dwellers.
There is a lot of anger and misery in the documentary and oppressive atmospheres (when the film came out some critics compared it to David Lynch’s surrealist Eraserhead), since the documentary was mainly shot underground in black and white.
Yet there are also some sparkles of optimism: driven underground by common experiences - from family tragedies to drug addiction - and surrounded by squalid environments, the subterranean dwellers try to recreate a new life in a shantytown made of huts built out of scrap iron and wood, but wired up to the city's electricity supply.
The best thing about this documentary is the fact that it was shot by the underground dwellers themselves who turned for the occasion into untrained and inexperienced yet skilled cameramen, electricians, sound recorders and technicians (one of them even turned a shopping cart into a camera dolly...).
Singer focuses more on the problem of homelessness and on its solutions in the documentary than on politics in general, yet I think it would be interesting to re-watch the documentary (or watch it for the first time...) now, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of the last few years, considering the rise in homelessness, the unstable economy and the global political situation.
In many ways the documentary should also made us ponder a bit about the future living conditions and solutions and the impact they will have on people's ability to survive. "You'd be surprised by what the human mind and the human body can adjust to,'' says one of the subterranean dwellers in the documentary. Over ten years after the documentary was shot, his words sound almost prophetic.
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they're going to re-release this one on DVD, which is very exciting. i wrote about it here:
http://blog.moviefone.com/2011/01/19/dark-days-documentary-unearthed-oscilloscope
p.s. been busy here, hope you're doing well!
Posted by: Alison | February 02, 2011 at 05:28 AM