This post was written by STF blogger Aaron Cael.
What first struck me while viewing Marc Singer’s film Dark Days are the touches that mark it as of its period—cars, the way passersby wear their hats, subtle changes in the sonic texture of the city—while the struggle of its subjects still feels very modern. If you’re broke, the future doesn’t change much. The daily grind of survival remains the same.
Survival is the main action in this film, a survey of lives lived underground in Amtrak tunnels in the mid-90s. (While the film was released in 2000, Singer says shooting finished in 1996.) The tunnel residents open their homes to the camera and discuss their home improvement projects in their shanties like any other homesteader or renovator. As above, life goes on with the locals going about chores and errands, gathering up for bull sessions about pets, past lives, security and the various hustles that keep them alive on the outside of the formal economy.
Shot on high speed black and white stock, the images are contrasty and thick grained, a style that Singer brings above-ground whenever a talking head comments on the situation, in a nice bit of image equality. These intrusions of the above-ground world are rare. Amtrak trains with their bright lights and clean lines look like interlopers when they rush through the frame. Singer mostly alternates between fly on the wall intimacy and scenes that look shot from a sniper’s distance, isolating figures at the far end of a long zoom.
Singer says he first heard of the tunnels as part of New York’s street mythology, a place that the homeless he met referred to like a den of monsters. He heard, “They eat people down there.” So
naturally, he had to check it out, soon moving into a shack down there among his eventual subjects, who he later enlisted as his crew. “I made a lot of friends and wanted to get some of them out,” he says. Having no idea how to make a film, Singer stumbled through the process with a mixture of extraordinary good luck and hard-headed perseverance. At times during editing, the money ran out and Singer was back on the street or staying on a couch with someone from the tunnels who’d made it into housing. At one point Singer walked away from $750,000 from a cable network who wanted a recut with more drugs and violence for their male 18-25 demographic. “What attracted me to [the people in the tunnel] is that they made the very best out of a bad situation. If they didn’t quit, I couldn’t quit,” he says.
Dark Days stands as the only film Marc Singer has made. After it’s initial success, he found a variety of commercial projects, but the sticking point always was being told by higher ups what sort of film he should be making. “I know what I’m good at… and I’m not good at that.”
[Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories]
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