Saturday, June 4th, 2005
8:30 - Live music by Ray Crandall (details below)
9:00 - The Films
On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, Gowanus/Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Dress warmly (it's cooler on the roof than in the streets).
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
ROCKAWAY plus La Revolution des Crabes and Smith and 9th
THE FILMS:
La Revolution des Crabes (Arthur de Pins, 4:50)
A charming French animation about a race of shellfish that have collectively internalized the concept of being trapped in a shell and who have doomed themselves to walk forever in the same direction. "We live in the browny waters of the Gironde estuary, between the rocks repainted with fuel and the muddy sand that provides a home for the best oysters in the world. No one is aware of the tragedy that has pervaded us for the last one hundred and twenty million years. We are the Pachygrapsus Marmoratus, commonly known as 'depressed crabs.'"
Smith and 9th (John Desroches, 3:30)
A short, lonely portrait of one of Brooklyn's great old elevated train stations, the charmingly dilapidated and rickety Smith and 9th Street stop for the F and the G lines.
Rockaway (Mark Street, 1:15:10) Filmmaker will be in attendance "The Rockaways seem to be torn between suburbs and the city. It reminded me of teenage girls."
--Mark Street in the Queens Chronicle
Carroll Gardens resident Mark Street journeys down the block to the roof of the Old American Can Factory with his new feature film about three girls--Kelly, Merida and Juanita--about to graduate from high school. Set in the faraway land of Rockaway, Queens, the film delicately maintains a resonant poetic power and a compelling naturalism throughout its exploration of the girls' anxieties and passions as they drift toward adulthood on the outermost edge of the city.
Rockaway follows the three girls as they date older men, contemplate their future, and express their inner pangs of jealousy and occasional feelings of outright malice toward one another. To a certain degree, the greatness of Mark StreetĮs film is determined by what it does not do: as "real" as any fiction film can ever hope to be, Rockaway tells its story without resorting to sensationalism or sentimental tropes and it eschews the clichåd contrivances of more mundane coming-of-age films. But, in the end, the film's wonderful emotional power is ultimately the result of incredibly vivid performances by the entire cast and by the sensitive metaphorical richness of Mark StreetĮs mise en scene.
Though set in a beach town with wide open skies populated by graceful airplanes and hovering gulls, everything in Rockaway nonetheless seems inevitably pulled back to earth: miniature remote controlled planes fly along the beach, reaching hopefully up towards the sky, but their altitude is forever limited by their own inadequacy as aircrafts; small boats float a few hundred feet offshore, buoyant upon the waves but still firmly anchored to the land; planes fly overhead in and out of JFK, theoretically bridging Rockaway to the rest of the world, yet every night MeridaĮs father comes back from his job at the airport still dressed in his uniform, going nowhere forever in the same dirty clothes. Clearly feeling as if she is eternally tied to her terrain, Kelly says she feels like she has become a marionette, tethered from above to an unseen hand just as the boats along the Rockaways are moored to the unseen seabed below.
While the film is shot almost entirely in the Rockaways--and faithful in detail and spirit to the locale--the neighborhood as it is represented in the film is also mythically, maddeningly, and perpetually liminal. The landscape itself reflects the frustrated minds of the young adults at the center of the film as they give voice to their conscious and subconscious fixations and attempt to reconcile their entrenched received ideas about life with their suddenly unsettled lives. Street deftly allows the metaphorical parallels between the land and the people to drive the spirit of his film, so he never needs to force a character to explain the connection outright. Over the course of the film all of the many oddities in the neighborhood--each lonely man on the beach, each slowly ascending airliner, and each solitary descending blimp--hypnotically begin to attain their own barely fathomable metaphorical weight.
A great deal of the content of the story was actually created by the cast and small crew as they improvised on location throughout the ten-day shoot. The scenes developed almost randomly with absolutely no script, all inspired by what must have at first been a rather vague and mysterious idea of "Rockaway." As the characters took shape, the cast moved from one inspirational location to the next, developing new scenarios and occasionally breaking away from the "story" to address the camera and deliver revealing soliloquies. After all the shooting was completed, Street took the footage home and carefully edited the scenes into an almost linear tale of coming of age.
He writes: I tried to bend the narrative form to meet my own needs, rather than let it dictate how the film was made. The film could have started anywhere and ended anywhere! I consider myself experimental in the true sense: I am putting things together in some sort of crazy stew, and I'm not sure how it's going to come out. To overextend the metaphor: there's no recipe (script)... it all evolves based on the process of making the film.
But what began as a narrative experiment eventually became a fully realized portrait of a neighborhood and a profoundly personal film, created in concert, by an ensemble cast performing at their peak. Rockaway is a great New York film, a compelling portrait of a unique, oft overlooked slice of the City--a place, as Street says, populated by "people hanging onto their concept of suburbia for dear life as the detritus of the city literally washes up on their shore." But what makes Rockaway transcendent is that each of its characters eventually comes alive and has his or her moment to jump off the screen. Watching Rockaway, one is inevitably tempted to imagine that the actors are not acting, but that they are in fact just everyday people from Queens, being themselves, walking down the boardwalk, and that they were all just coincidentally captured on camera at a moment that their lives seemed to be reaching an apex--or seemed to be falling apart. This, of course, is the sensation that realsm in film was always meant to achieve. The result is nearly magical, and, by the end of the film, the little town of Rockaway, Queens will never again seem so far away, or so very much like home.
THE MUSIC:
Singer-songwriter Ray Crandall croons to open our second opening night.
