What lies beneath: Marc Singer explores Manhattan's underground community

The Architecture Foundation’s bi-monthly Architecture on Film series continues at the Barbican with Dark Days (2000), an extraordinary documentary about a self-sufficient homeless community of one hundred people, living nestled beneath a Midtown Amtrack tunnel in New York.

Lauded at the SXSW and Sundance film festivals, director Marc Singer’s compassionate film explores the three-mile long subterranean shantytown, revealing an autonomous space formed without the infrastructure of architects or town planners.

After gaining the community’s confidence, Singer lived in the tunnel for over a year and went from an interloper to a collaborator with the inhabitants - who became the film crew. His dedication to capturing what he saw to enlighten those living above ground led to sourcing borrowed cameras, seeking donated film, maxing out credit cards and tapping into the city’s electricity source for lighting. The result is a grainy, black and white film with a DJ Shadow soundtrack that is a portal into a highly resilient community.

Accompanying Dark Days is architect-turned-artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 short film, Substrait (Underground Dailies). Preempting Singer’s urban curiosity, Matta-Clark taps into a metropolis without polish. Visually the piece is raw and unrefined, more than matching the subject matter of train-tracks, sewers and crypts. Intriguingly, we see Matta-Clark searching for the same Amtrack tunnel, an urban myth until Singer’s revelation some 24 years later. 

Justin Jaeckle, curator of Architecture on Film, expressed how both films influence our reading of the cityscape and the rational behind the programme: 'Architecture on Film gives a platform to the subjectivities of stand-out artists, filmmakers and moving image works, in search of lateral angles into a discussion of architecture and the city.  The underground of the city is a metropolis’ subconscious”. Jaeckle believes that using film as a medium, in particular location shooting, shows the built environment in flux and can importantly document a community at its point of transition. 

Rachel Borchard is a member of Black Country Atelier