Arts &Entertainment

`Dark Days'

Documentary goes underground to
uncover human tragedy and spirit.

AUDREY BECKER
Special to the Jewish News

T

here's a fascinating story behind the story of
Dark Days, Marc Singer's award-winning
documentary showing at the Detroit Film
Theatre on Monday, Feb. 12.
Although the film tells an intimate tale of a group of
homeless people living underground in a New York
City train tunnel, Dark Days doesn't reveal that Singer
himself was no outsider. He was an integral member
and resident of the tunnel community for more than
two years.
Singer, born in 1973 and transplanted to New York
City from London, had heard about people living in
the tunnels through friends who lived on the streets.
"I got fascinated by that and started to go exploring,"
he says.
At the outset, he became part of the community
without any idea of making a film. As he puts it,
he was "just hanging out and trying to help out
some people."

His motivations for
living in the tunnels
were humanitarian and
activist. But they were
also personal: "There's
some stuff that I don't
— won't — talk about.
Not because it's bad,
but because it's mine."
Dark Days is an intensely honest portrait of several
individuals struggling to maintain a sense of normality
in a squalid underground world. The film reveals a
close-knit community that has an elaborate social net-
work made up of philosophers, electricians, cooks and
carpenters.
Beneath the city streets, these so-called "homeless"
had built houses with sturdy walls defining separate liv-
ing spaces. They furnish their private rooms with scav-
enged couches and rugs; they listen to music and watch
television on appliances rescued from dumpsters; they
prepare meals in functional kitchens powered by the
city's electrical sources.

`Before Night Falls'

y

ou can't stop art. Just like
grass, it comes through the
cracks, even after cement has
been poured on top of it. It's
the same thing with homosexuality or
any human impulse. You can't eradicate
people."
So proclaims artist-director Julian
Schnabel. This observation is the essence
of his second movie, Before Night Falls, _
an acclaimed bio-pic about the persecut-
ed gay Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas,
who eventually succumbed to AIDS. In
his memoirs, Arenas boasted of 5,000
sexual partners. •
Schnabel, 49, a New York-based artist,
was less captivated by Arenas' sexual
escapades than by the compelling story
of his oppression under the Castro
regime. Ironically, the promiscuous
Arenas says he abstained while in jail,

eg; 4

2/9
2001

76

All the while, they fight courageously to
keep the rats at bay.
"I was realizing that the people are nothing
like I'd thought they would be like," Singer
recalls. "All my ideas about what a homeless
person should be like were shattered."
The initial idea for making a docu-
mentary came from Ralph, one of the
residents of the underground . communi-

"One night we're sitting around the fire,
laughing about something that had happened
that day, and one of the guys said,
`Somebody should be making a film about
this.'"
That off-hand remark prompted Singer to
begin the project in earnest, renting cameras,
lighting and sound equipment, with generous
support from a local camera shop.
Singer financed the project, like many an independ-
ent filmmaker, by using credit cards and borrowing
money. Singer met co-producer, and fellow
Englishman, Ben Freedman in a bar one night. Like
Singer-, Freedman had no background in film. But they
shared a vision of what the film could be and what it
could do.
"We figured we could make the film and then sell it
and the money would help get them out of the tun-
nel," Singer says. "And they'd be the whole film crew,
so they'd be helping themselves get themselves out. At
the same time, we'd be changing the way that people

don't think anybody can make art with-
out having experiences, whether it's a
novel or music."
In the hyperventilating art world of
the 1980s, Schnabel was the most
renowned and controversial painter on
the scene. His immense neo-
Expressionist canvases were
notable for the ambiguous,
evocative imagery amid shards
of broken crockery, antlers,
pony hides, chains and a bru-
tal handling of pigment. His
partisans were legion, as were
his detractors.
Once the art boom cooled,
artists like Schnabel, David
Salle and Robert Longo
briefly turned their attentions
to film. But only Basquiat,
Julian Schnabel directs "Before Night Falls," a
Schnabel's 1996 biography of
film about Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas.
the doomed African-
American painter Jean-Michel
because he could not bear to have sex
Basquiat, revealed directorial promise.
without freedom.
Schnabel piizzles over why the tragedy
Schnabel ponders any connection
of Arenas appealed to him as subject •
between totalitarianism and the flower-
matter for his follow-up film.
ing of Arenas' ecstatic literary output.
"There are a million different reasons
"If he wasn't a prisoner and a stranger
why I cannot explain why I made this
in his own country, would Reinaldo
movie," he offers. "But I think it's about
Arenas have been able to write with the
the last 50 years of Cuban history, and it
kind of vehemence and anger that was
tells that story through this man's life of
very for c eful as literature?" he asks. "I

Artist Julian Schnabel earns directorial respect.

JOEY BERLIN and
DON MCLAUGHLIN
Copley News Service

Photo by David Stenglein

At The Movies

the optimism and disillusionment with
the revolution."
Schnabel contrasts his own relative
luck with the sorry lot of the . hapless
Arenas.
Brooklyn-born and raised in
Brownsville, Texas, the Jewish artist
seems the consummate Renaissance
man — moviemaker, respected painter,
autobiographer and musician.
Reflecting on the breadth and privilege
of his career in a Vanity Fair interview,
Schnabel says he most - identifies with
Jesus and considers self-employment his
greatest achievement.
"My father came from Czechoslovakia
when he was 16 as a stowaway on a
boat," he notes. "He worked hard all his
life so I could have time to figure out
what my life was all about. My parents
were encouraging, but they were terri-
fied I became an artist. They thought I
was insane. But I had a privileged life,
and never worried about money. •
"But if a person like me lived in Cuba,
I would've gone to jail. So I needed to
be true to Reinaldo's voice, because
everyone is entitled to [his] imagination.
Arenas wrote poems, but everything that
doesn't fit into the revolution in Cuba is
counter-revolutionary"
The film's star is the Spanish actor