Dark Days is a black and white documentary that covers the same subject matter as Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People and Margaret Morton’s The Tunnel, the subterranean tunnel dwellers of New York City. The film is the sole documentary by filmmaker Marc Singer, and has won a number of ‘best documentary’ awards in the year of its release.
Singer’s documentary is essentially a film version of the above mentioned books. The Mole People is a flawed work of journalism, The Tunnel is primarily a book of black and white photos, and Dark Days is a step further than the two, providing a deep investigation into the lives of the people who live under the NYC streets that validates aspects of Toth’s scrutinized text (although not the most outlandish aspects, such as stories of an underground citadel beneath grand central station), and with its black-and-white aesthetic, provides the dimension of time to Morton’s photographic work. All this is set to a musical score composed by DJ Shadow. What’s notable about Singer’s film is the sense of society, in tension with a sense of individual isolation, in that, while it shows the men living in solitude under conditions of 24-hour darkness, the film also displays a number of friendships between these people. The film also partially displays an economy of scavenging and the sale of found objects, an essentially social activity. The film is also important for showing the resourcefulness of the tunnel-dwellers and their ability to find novel ways to fulfill the necessities of life.
Banksy’s Coming for Dinner is a mockumentary depicting a dinner party hosted by Joan Collins (an actress?) and her husband, on their aristocratic estate, where they entertain a small group of guests including the trendy and mysterious street artist, Banksy. The film is a play on celebrity and art, and particularly the notion that an individual can become a celebrity while remaining withdrawn from the public.
Banksy is an enigma, not simply because he’s anonymous - most street artists do what they can to conceal their identities - but because through some unknown alchemical process, he gets to be the graffiti artist who ascends to superstar. His work means more than other graffiti works and he has people who generally have no interest in graffiti and street art defending it as art rather than vandalism, and great art rather than good art. Banksy thus becomes a brand name for quality graffiti for people who wouldn’t know the difference, and this brand is produced through media, the circulation of reputations, and an art market rooted in contemporary consumerist practices based on shock, novelty, appropriation, and the exploitation of subcultures.
Massow’s film is a documentary featuring a dinner party with Banksy in attendance. The mockumentary is a prank upon the people who’ve caught the Banksy fever and are hoping to learn a little or just see the face of the artist in this film, as Massow leads his audience to believe that the film is an authentic dinner party, rather than a staged farce. Banksy appears as a pathetic man-child who attends the dinner with his mother, who drives him and makes sure that the ride is well-stocked with plenty of treats. Banksy is largely a source of pointless statements through the dinner, which is pretty much the extent of his presense in thhis film. This is obviously a fictionalized Banksy, and Massow is exploiting the artist’s anonymous status as a way of making fun of him and his admirers. Art is not really a topic in the film, but rather the magnetic draw of the celebrity - of celebrities towards one another, and of an audience so enraptured with an anonymous, heavily hyped artist, that they would watch a film where he eats dinner, just to catch a glimpse.
