THE DARK SIDE

The German writer Walter Benjamin in his short 1940 essay On The Concept of History, talks of the rubble that the Angel of History sees as he looks backwards in the midst of a storm we call progress. The storm that was Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath recalled to me these lines of Benjamin and are indicative of how I made this unusual film. I felt some unique quality of what Benjamin speaks of in these lines was illuminated during the darkness that struck many parts of New York City in the days following Hurricane Sandy. The storm seemed to breach not only physical walls and barriers but also invisible but no less real walls between people, between ideas of what is a natural disaster and what is a man-made one, and between the usually well-defined zones of the present and the past.

As a low-budget NYC filmmaker, I have always been aware that the streets of the city offer a virtually free location. In the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, these had a unique quality that had both documentary importance and for me reverberated with opportunities to breach boundaries between genres and between fiction and non-fiction. In regards to cinematic inspirations, I had in mind the work of the English documentary filmmaker Peter Watkins, whose work mixes fiction and documentary, and the work of Luis Bunuel, especially The Exterminating Angel. In this Bunuel film, guests at a dinner party are unable to leave until they become trapped by these feelings of inertia while outside there is another world.

From the beginning I had to work quickly and with no time to plan if I was going to capture what was happening. Based on our previous experience working together and their availability, I was fortunate to be able to assemble for the first day of shooting co-producer Ged Dickersin, cinematographer Valentina Caniglia and actor Edoardo Ballerini. Edoardo asked me about his character. I said that for now the costume ideas we had agreed upon would have to suffice. We had no way of recording audio. I would just have him walk through the repair crews and the dark streets of the East Village. Afterwards, if the footage looked promising, I would create a story, elaborate his character and cast additional actors to play other characters and schedule additional days of shooting. When I got home early the next morning and looked at the footage, I knew I wanted to try to push forward with this experiment.

Another breakthrough came when Ged and I went out to Queens to volunteer. The volunteer station we had expected to find wasn’t there but we discovered instead a charity established after 9/11 to assist FDNY firefighters and their families. In the course of delivering supplies, I was able to tentatively discuss my plans to shoot a movie with two of the firefighters and I made plans to stay in touch with one of them. The filming I began with Edo became the genesis of the fictional part of the film and the conversations I had with NYFD firefighters who had lost their homes became the basis for the documentary dimension to the film. Combining romantic comedy with the documentary will likely strike audiences as oxymoronic on one level but it does I think prove very successful at being a clash that is both rewardingly provocative and entertaining. Two other elements that proved decisive in completing the open-ended project were the quintet led by Paul Neubauer [I need to find out how to refer to this quartet] who play Romani music (also known as “Gypsy music”) and permission from two of the firefighters to use footage they had shot during the storm. The way these various phenomena--visual and auditory--swirl around—like the unexpected people and objects we see swirling around Dorothy’s house when it is lifted by a tornado in the Wizard of Oz—is the figurative dimension that breaches the film’s documentary form and underlines it at the same time.

Richard Ledes 2014