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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER   OCTOBER 2000 VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1

Dark Days: Life Under The Streets of New York
By Hank Williams

The nice thing about films like Marc Singer’s Dark Days is that they come as a welcome change from this summer’s films. It is truly thoughtful, funny, human, and interesting.

Dark Days documents life in a semi-abandoned Amtrak railroad tunnel under Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a group of homeless people. The shelter provided by the tunnel allows them to create a shanty town of sorts, consisting of shacks built from scraps of wood and ingeniously fitted with electricity.

The result is a sense of community and a feeling of a home life with the relative comforts of refrigerators, lights, and the ability to cook. The residents are shown caring for pets (dogs seem to be popular), and going to work in the morning, collecting cans, books, or any discarded odds and ends they can sell.

The problem is that the shacks are not homes. The tunnel dwellers endlessly battle rats and dirt while living in constant fear of fire or eviction by Amtrak. As bad as the tunnel is, the residents reveal that life on the street or in the city’s horrid shelters is much worse.

Part of the adventure of Dark Days is the incredible luck Marc Singer had just getting the film finished. Singer knew nothing about filmmaking, but decided that he needed to do something to help the homeless. During the five years it took to make Dark Days, Singer lost everything he had and became homeless himself when all his money was gone and his credit cards were maxed out from the cost of trying to make the movie.

Dark Days is not a hard luck story, however. The tunnel residents became the film crew, rigging camera dollies by hand and patching into electrical lines to power the camera and lights. The film eventually became a tool for the tunnel residents to get themselves out. The tunnel residents “weren’t feeling sorry for themselves: they were trying to do the best that they could,” says Singer.

Singer’s intention became to use whatever money the film earned to help the tunnel dwellers move into decent housing.

Singer and his makeshift crew benefited from a healthy dose of luck, committing every possible mistake that could be made, but still getting usable film and sound. Help came from unlikely sources, like the camera shop that let Singer walk out of the door with thousands of dollars worth of equipment that he sometimes didn’t even know how to properly operate; and Kodak, that donated the film to finish Dark Days when he was flat broke and out of film.

The triumph of Dark Days is that it humanizes its subjects. Homeless people are presented as people, not as a “problem” or “situation,” which is the usual way they are dealt with in the media. The tunnel residents organize themselves to better their situation and when the final eviction really does come from Amtrak, the event is triumphant, rather than pathetic.

The irony is that people lived for nearly 20 years, invisible to the public, under what has become one of the most affluent parts of Manhattan.

Dark Days was filmed in black-and-white, mostly because Singer thought it would be easier to deal with. The result, however, is a film that treats its subjects respectfully and has a timeless quality. It also shows what can be accomplished when ordinary people come together to fight for themselves.

Dark Days, 84 minutes, Playing at Cinema Village, 22 E. 12th

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