Dark Days, Singer Come to Tower Theaters

Director Marc Singer will screen his documentary Dark Days at Tower Theaters Wednesday, February 28, at 7:30 pm. He will answer questions following the screening. Photo by David Stenglein.

By Francesca I. Texidor '01

Marc Singer had never before picked up a video camera before he began filming Dark Days, a documentary film about the homeless living in Amtrak tunnels under Manhattan. A homeless man in Singer's East Village neighborhood told him about people who lived in the railroad tunnels between 72nd and 125th streets beneath the West Side Highway. Singer visited the tunnel several times before he started filming.

What Singer saw when he went below the surface was that many tunnel homeless people had built intricate homes in the muck. The tunnels are ten degrees colder than the surface; two hundred people went underground in the summer, and in the winter about seventy-five lived there. Singer says that, “some parts of the tunnel did not smell at all and other parts made your eyes water.”

The twenty year old from London did not go underground with the purpose of starting a film career or as an experiment to witness how the “other half” lived. Singer believes that poverty does not remove a person's humanity. He visited the tunnel residents several times before the idea for a documentary came to him, about seven years ago. Ralph, a tunnel inhabitant, commented that someone should make a movie about the lives of tunnel dwellers. Singer decided to take the risk. He financed the film on borrowed cash, credit cards, and sold belongings. When the filmmaker had nothing left, he moved underground.

Incredible luck, generosity, and advocacy made the film work. An employee of Cinevision, a downtown camera shop, gave Singer a crash course in filmmaking 101 and lent him cameras for what evolved into a five-and-a-half-year project. Kodak donated all the film needed to complete fifty hours of black-and-white footage. Some tunnel residents, who enjoy partial ownership of Dark Days, helped make the film by building dollies and rigging lights systems. Film needs light to lock an image, but the tunnels were pitch black. Singer says the tunnel crew figured out a way to siphon forty blocks worth of light power at one time by rigging electrical boxes underground. No professional film people were involved in production.

Dark Days made it to the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, where it won awards for audience, freedom of expression, and cinematography. After seeing Dark Days at the festival, Kristin Feeley '00 and Jennie-Sue Nuccio '00, members of the College's Film and Video Collective, talked with Marc Singer and invited him to campus.

Singer has been to several other colleges and high schools. He believes that where his film is shown has nothing to do with how people interpret it. He likes to think of people strictly as individuals. He says, “I want people to interpret it however they want to interpret it. I don't want to tell people what to feel and what to think.” Dark Days portrays the tunnel homeless as individuals. The film, which Singer describes as both “funny and sad,” offers a human perspective. He says the film is “about people, about the human spirit.”

When asked whether he will do a second film, Singer said that he plans to take a break. “I'm waiting to see what my heart tells me,” he says.

Singer will come to South Hadley to screen the 84-minute Dark Days (with music mixed by DJ Shadow) at Tower Theaters Wednesday, February 28, at 7:30 pm. After the film, he will answer questions. The event is cosponsored by the Mount Holyoke Film Studies Program and the UMass Multicultural Film Festival.