Black & White, High Contrast, and Rats




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  • 2012-10-17 19:02:56
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“Hey, we should make a film about this!” With these words uttered by a friend, then-amateur British filmmaker Mark Singer began a two-year-long documentary film project about a small community of homeless people living in the underground subway tunnels of New York City. Released in 2000, the highly disturbing but also thought-provoking picture gained wide critical acclaim and won several important documentary film awards. [caption id="attachment_7180" align="alignleft" width="252" caption="Photo Courtesy of www.mvdb2b.com"][/caption] Ominously called “Dark Days”, the film was screened for AUBG students by the Documentary Film Club past Monday, October 15th. The adviser (and founder) of the club, independent filmmaker and professor Melody Gilbert stated that this is the documentary which had pushed her into film-making. Due to technical difficulties with the equipment in the Andrey Delchev Auditorium, the film had to be screened in one of the classrooms of the Balkanski Academic Center, the walls of which somehow obscured the sound of the motion picture. As soon as the film began, though, the viewers were quickly taken to another world, a world of only two, high-contrasted, colors – black and white, with the former dominating throughout the picture. “Dark Days” is a visual narrative of the gloomy life of a group of homeless and, apparently, hopeless people living under the streets of Midtown Manhattan. Director Mark Singer had already been living with them for several months and had conceived of the idea of a documentary in order to draw some attention to his homeless friends and, eventually, help them out of the tunnels. Singer shot the piece with a rented camera, using 16mm black and white film stock because, allegedly, he had been told by a movie-maker friend “If you shoot color and you don't know what you're doing, you'll f*** it all up and it will come out looking all green or red." The painfully realistic documentary was to be Singer’s debut in film-making.   [caption id="attachment_7181" align="alignright" width="315" caption="Photo Courtesy of www.thedocumentaryblog.com"][/caption] The viewer is quickly introduced to some of the more colorful (no pun intended) inhabitants of the underground community who begin to tell their stories without the help of a voice-over narrative, all the while taking care of their one-room make-shift slum-houses, scavenging the tunnels and the streets for valuable recoverable garbage, engaging in friendly conversations, which at times surprise with their existential depth. The darker side of this already dark place is also vividly portrayed, especially the tunnel residents’ frequent use of crack. One of the most hard-hitting and heart-moving scenes depicts one of the main characters, a homeless woman, who tearfully reminisces about the death of her two children in an apartment fire, when she had not been able to react due to drug consumption. The sense of hopelessness is intensified, as the viewer begins to understand more and more about the life of the subterranean men and women of the impoverished community. And all around, rats looking for a piece of food, or anything that can be eaten, just to make it through another day.   Needless to say, the happy ending of the documentary was completely unexpected and, thus, even happier. Shortly before the forcible eviction of the underground residents by the New York Police, they are finally provided with normal, above-the-ground, housing in the Big Apple. The film ends with the bright full-of-hope faces of the former underground people, as they look ahead to the future, determined to never again end up in the dark place from where they had thankfully come out.