FILM
As New York City swarms with cell phones and flickering PDAs, Marc Singer's documentary Dark Days brings some much-needed perspective to a subterranean world mostly untouched by new technology.
Singer's debut film is a bleak look at the lives of the homeless people who inhabit an abandoned Amtrak tunnel near Penn Station. Singer lived with his subjects for two years, hired them as his crew, and shot the 84-minute film with an Arriflex SR2 in black and white and without voiceover. In guerrilla mode, Singer tapped Consolidated Edison's electric lines to run the lights and rigged a shopping cart to act as the camera dolly.
Rather than focusing on survival (the camera rarely takes us aboveground), Singer concentrates on the human impulse to nest, interviewing his subjects folding laundry and decorating. The filmmaker ultimately achieves the Herculean task of evoking empathy for a situation that usually commands only pity.
Dark Days: opens nationwide in September, www.darkdays.com
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