project film school

pfs meeting 8/7/07 : dark days

(directed by marc singer)

last night's project film school went very well. thanks to jay and his doc loving ways, we decided to watch dark days, a film about homeless people living under new york city's penn station. for everyone but daria and i, it was the first time experiencing the film.

the film itself is amazingly verite, with little to no exposition or explanation from the filmmakers, except to provide us with the names of the characters and a major plot point halfway through that dealt directly with an inability to film.

what really struck me about the film the first time i saw it and even more so this go around, was how it is in many ways a survival film, like most period pieces depicting life on the american frontier. it challenged conventional notions of what we as people can stand and what we do to survive when we need to.

technically there was much to marvel at as well. it's hard to believe that dark days was shot on film, in a place with no light and horrific sound - for a film with all of these barriers, it looks and sounds terrific.

everyone seemed in agreement that this was something everyone should see - with all pfs'ers thinking of who they were going to recommend it to.

i'll leave this pfs entry with jonathan rosenbaum's brief review from the chicago reader, which i think sums the film up pretty nicely and also provides some good background info:

With no prior training in film, 21-year-old Londoner Marc Singer set out to make this 16-millimeter black-and-white documentary (2000) about the homeless people living in the tunnels under New York's Penn Station. Singer's six-year quest--including a brief stint of being homeless himself--deserves notice, and in a way I'm disappointed that the film doesn't go into greater detail about it. But what's most remarkable and fascinating here are the squatters, who do a pretty good job of explaining themselves without any outside narrator (and who, in countless ways, assisted Singer in shooting the film). The lives of these people inside their shacks are full of surprises (one keeps several dogs as pets, another shaves with an electric razor and a broken mirror) as well as grim confirmations (the self-loathing misery of a crackhead who lost her children in a fire), but the things we don't know about them also significantly shape our experience of the film. 84 min.