Battle For Brooklyn: When Neighbors Take on Big Business

• by Rahul Chadha, December 18, 2011

This post was written by STF blogger Aaron Cael.

What happens when Frank Gehry wants to, as he says, “build a community from scratch,” on top of your existing community? Battle for Brooklyn chronicles that struggle as Prospect Heights residents wake up to find themselves living in the footprint of the planned Atlantic Yards development, a subsidy-soaked high profile construction project backed by a veritable whos-who of New York heavy hitters: Mayor Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer, Marty Markowitz, Jay-Z and the megaproject firm Forest City Ratner. The film serves as an important study of just how the lumbering juggernaut of crony capitalism moves through economic, social and political realms, flattening all opposition.

What drives the film are the machinations of these soundbite-dropping familiar faces, and the strong characters on both sides who lay out the facts as they see them. On the side of the long-time neighborhood residents, the cameras track Daniel Goldstein as he fights the strange battle that comes when powerful people want to take your home and build a stadium on top of it with your tax dollars. Bruce Bender, Executive VP at Forest Ratner, ostensibly makes the other side’s case, but somehow ends up making a pretty good argument that the dealings with those being driven from their homes are far from ethical. Bender looks close to winking when he’s singing the praises of the jobs to be created in telemarketing, VIP services and concessions by relieving small business owners in the project’s path of their property and livelihood. There’s also a meta-character hovering around in the background—Eminent Domain—that is both seen and unseen, a figure with nearly limitless potential to destroy that only shows up in the text of court rulings and the cute jokes that elected officials make about stealing property.
 
There’s an implicit honesty to the film’s lack of slickness. The camera shakes, the audio drops out at times or gets drowned by the truck horns and demolition crews. These flaws mark it as a document made by a situation, a response to a crisis, and not a detached eye hovering above the little people. Flawed in no way means inept: I challenge any other filmmaker to eke as much tension out of a shot of a man sitting at his computer, hitting ‘refresh’ on a web browser over and over. It all adds up to a careful, patient refutation of the claim made by Bloomberg at the film’s midpoint, “You have Bruce Ratner’s word; that should be good enough.” 
 
After the film, primary subject Daniel Goldstein described the film as being essentially about the government and developers “working together to deny people their rights…. an issue that cuts across the political spectrum.” Director Michael Galinsky concurred, citing the strange allies the struggle brought together. (Both conservative columnist George Will and civil liberties attorney Norman Siegel appear in the film.) “It’s not left, it’s not right. It’s just wrong.”

[Photo: from left, director Michael Galinsky and producer David Beilinson, courtesy of Simon Luethi]

Comments

Thanks Aaron - that’s such a thoughtful post.
Michael

    – .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (12/23  at  10:32 PM)

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