A concert about the river, next to a river, in Queens
A screening in Socrates Park. Sam Schube
8:02 am Jul. 8, 2010
The Socrates Sculpture Garden, feet from the East River in Long Island City, provided a slightly ramshackle outdoor setting—dried-up brown grass and gravel, a corner set aside for metal fabrication—on a muggy Tuesday evening for a screening of "Flood Tide: Remixed," a short film presented as a part of Rooftop Films’ summer series.
Rooftop Films, a non-profit arts initiative, prides itself on throwing nontraditional events. On Tuesday, that meant showing a special cut of the film (“Remix”), along with a live performance of the score by its composers, the band Dark Dark Dark. The film’s director is also the band’s bass player.
In the words of Rooftop founder and artistic director Mark Elijah Rosenberg, the group doesn’t host film screenings so much “site-specific experiences. It’s more than seeing a movie.” The group pairs with Kickstarter, an in-vogue communal-funding website. This lends the proceedings a sort of handmade quality: with a dollar from each ticket (at paid events; this one was free) returning to the director, the audience members can be said to be directly funding the film themselves.
Tuesday’s screening broadened its focus beyond the film to the river: the piece is a narrative short film stemming from the artist Swoon’s “Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea,” a project that saw a number of artist friends build fantastical crafts from found objects and float them down the Hudson River. (Hence the choice of a slightly disorganized, waterfront sculpture garden as the screening venue.) As Rosenberg, smallish with a shaved head and a serious demeanor, said, “You get the humidity, the smell of the river. It’s part of a greater communal experience.”
Communal was certainly the buzzword of the evening: there were plenty of the scruffy beards, tank tops, and floral prints expected at an arthouse screening, but there were also several families with children and dogs, too. (It was no Raffi concert, though: there was a bicycle valet.) Dark Dark Dark, playing against a backdrop of the river, Roosevelt Island, and a handful of Manhattan skyscrapers, did a brief set of somber, piano-based tunes while the sun set.
Two adolescent brothers, both successfully resisting summer haircuts, clambered over a set of stone steps and peered through the bushes out toward Vernon Boulevard. Sarah Mack, a woman in a long black dress, square frames, and chopsticked bun, was in attendance “because my friends do a lot of fabulous stuff.” (Her day job: “I make stuff and move it around, I guess.”) She offered a hello and a slice of fresh watermelon to nearly everyone who walked past.
The band finished and stepped offstage, while the crowd snacked at picnic spreads or waited in line for local soul food.
The film is a fictionalized backstory for the crafts in Swoon’s “Swimming Cities”—the barely there narrative has a handful of creative types, faced with unemployment and a general malaise, taking to the water on colorful, homemade rafts made of barrels, discarded lumber, and other assorted detritus, making up boats only in the loosest, most playful sense of the word. The piece is slow and meditative, echoing both the river at its center and the general feeling of the evening.
A sno-cone machine interrupted the proceedings occasionally, but the determined buzz-grind didn’t feel entirely out of place; Rian Rooney, a Columbia University architecture student in attendance, remarked that “the whole thing, more than just the movie, kind of felt like summer.” The symmetry was unavoidable and hopelessly romantic: just like the film’s characters, the evening’s attendees were drawn by the tug of an imagined community to a ramshackle, handmade project down by the river. “Your hands are stronger than you ever imagined,” the band sang at one point, “so just use them!” The suggestion was well taken.
