Dark Days - Marc Singer

Marc Singer ci porta nei sotterranei della ferrovia, dove, a New York, sopravvivono degli esseri umani, senza niente, se non pochi spiccioli di carità o lavoretti.

poi un giorno si scopre che le ferrovie vogliono sfrattare quei poveracci, a volte tossicodipendenti, e miracolosamente quelle persone riescono a ottenere un appartamento.

c'è tanta roba che merita nel film, ma basterebbe il loro sorriso per una casa vera per non perdere il film, promesso - Ismaele

 

The dwellers journey to the surface for food and treasure. "Kosher restaurants are the best," one says, "because the food isn't all mixed up with coffee grounds." They look for cans and bottles that can be redeemed. Sometimes they find things they can sell: "Gay porno is the best." Watching this movie, I was reminded of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, his memoir of 18 months spent living in abject poverty. What he learned, he said, was that tramps were not tramps out of choice, but necessity. Hard luck and bad decisions had led to worse luck and fewer choices, until they were stuck at the bottom. To call a homeless person lazy, he said, was ignorant, because the homeless must work ceaselessly just to stay alive. To tell them to get a job is a cruel joke, given their opportunities. "Dark Days" is the portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster. You could call them homemakers.

da qui

 

…Singer clearly has a melancholic nostalgia for his time spent in the tunnels, living with his subjects, immersed in their experience. This is more evident in the "Life After the Tunnel" featurette, a collection of stills from the movie with Singer narrating. The documentarian has kept in touch with most of the people in the movie and tracked their journeys. For the most part, the main people featured in Dark Days have gotten on well with their lives above ground. They got clean, got jobs, and rebuilt their existences, flying in the face of conventional cynicism and the misconception that people living on the streets don't want change or help. Granted, the move wasn't 100% successful, but nothing ever is. Even so, humanity is perhaps the most resilient natural resource we have.

da qui

…Singer was a former resident of the tunnels, and it shows: his closeness to his subjects, both literal and emotional, is apparent in every scene. They’re as comfortable with Singer and his camera as he is with them, and this allows him an access to material which most ‘professional’ documentarists – i.e. outsiders – would struggle to match. And Singer is clearly a gifted film-maker, though this isn’t necessarily to Dark Days‘ advantage. Despite its zero budget, it looks amazing, full of atmospheric black-and-white shots of the tunnels, the trains, the streets and the people…

da qui