B/side.

by Abigail Child, 1996

JEFFREY SKOLLER

Many urban artists who lived through the gentrification of major American cities in the 1980s, and struggled to find low-priced work and living space in the midst of sky-rocketing rents, unwittingly found themselves in coalition and more often in conflict with the urban poor who were being pushed out of their housing and onto the streets. In cities like New York and San Francisco, artist colonization of low-income neighborhoods from the Lower East Side to the Mission District began gentrification processes that often ended not only in the displacement of the poor but also in the eventual displacement of the artists themselves. As a result, there was a wide range of artist responses from the guerrilla activism of groups such as San Francisco's Urban Rats to institutionalized art world exhibitions such as Martha Rosler's project "If You Lived Here," sponsored by New York City's Dia Foundation.(1) Combining their art practices and social activism, these artists examined the intersection between the personal, formal and sociological as it coalesced around issues of homelessness.

There were also film and video projects that emphasized the complex position of the maker in relation to the political issue, creating distinctions from social documentary traditions of objective reportage and analysis. Films such as David Lee's To a World Not Listening (1980), Bill Brand's Home Less Home (1990) and Yvonne Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women (1985) are examples of experimental films that addressed this perspective. There were also many video artists and community activist groups who made radically innovative videotapes. Such works include Clayton Patterson's documentation of the Tompkins square Park riot, Paul Garrin's By Any Means Necessary (1990) and Arlyn Gajilan's Not Just a Number (1986) as well as numerous videos made at New York City's Educational Video Center.(2) As a political stance much of this video activism adopted social-realist and agit-prop strategies exploring the empirical and sociological implications of such issues as a way of exposing the politics of urban housing struggles that had remained well-hidden behind dominant political and cultural discourses.

Nearly a decade after these works were made, Abigail Child's 38-minute film B/side (1996) arrived without the first wave urgency or didacticism of earlier works such as those described above. The film makes a unique contribution by actively looking at the external environment of the urban homeless as well as speculating on their individual interior lives. This interplay between the actual and virtual worlds of homelessness constructs a complex and intensely beautiful work of art as it addresses the recurring problem of integrating social activism and innovative aesthetic practice. In direct opposition to the anti-aesthetic strategy of much social-issue media of the last 15 years, which has moved away from formal modernist strategies in favor of more conventional social documentary, journalistic and theatrical forms, Child aggressively reasserts the aesthetic and speculative processes of art making into the context of a complex social problem. In doing so, she re-engages the representations of social injustices that have been rendered mundane by the well worn tropes and rhetoric commonly used in the genre of social documentary. Child uses the emotional power of the aesthetic and formal experience of cinema to examine the ongoing problems of urban homelessness.

As in her other films, grouped and collectively entitled Is This What you Were Born For? (1981-1987), Child revives the radical metric and tonal montage strategies of Dziga Vertov and Peter Kubelka to produce dynamic relationships between image, sound, motion and texture. The aggressive fragmenting of the image produces new kinds of meanings and connections through the graphic juxtaposition of images and rhythmic velocity. Child emphasizes the plasticity of the cinematic as a means of representing the dynamic quality of a social condition that is in continuous transformation.

B/side takes place in a homeless encampment known as Dinkinsville that was formed on the Lower East Side of New York City in June 1991 after the city forcibly evicted groups of homeless people living in nearby Tompkins square Park. In one of the many nearby vacant lots the displaced groups built an elaborate village of wooden shanties and tents. The short-lived community was again disbanded when the city bulldozed the encampment in October 1991. Through a hyper-kinetic accumulation of image fragments Child produces a geography of the neighborhood as a liminal space somewhere between a concrete urban environment and a post-apocalyptic landscape that is in the process of returning to nature and in which there is often no distinction between indoors and outdoors.

Contrary to the standard liberal-humanist image of poverty that is endured in silent abjection, this film shows a neighborhood teeming with life and activity. Among the rubble of crumbling buildings, trashed cars and empty lots overgrown by weeds, Child reveals the full scope of human life. People fix cars, wash clothes, talk, make love, drink and play. Some kids ride bikes, while others sell goods from sidewalk flea markets. The film focuses on an unnamed black woman who is first observed sleeping outside, uncovered, with the shadows of leaves gently caressing her face. Child emphasizes the sensuality of the woman through the play of light and shadow. As the fragmented montage of the film continues, the quiet, recurring image of the sleeping woman invites the viewer to contemplate the possibility of an inner world not as a respite from the harshness of her outer world, but as an integral part of it. In this way B/side moves beyond the representation of people without homes as merely victims of social inequity and political injustice. It shows people in this situation as desiring subjects with powerful internal lives, histories and active imaginations.

Child resists a single narrative plot that sorts out the daily life of a homeless woman into an easily comprehensible trajectory by presenting several possible narratives and dramatic events spanning fantasy, dream and reality. The narrative elements are presented in bits and pieces and often evaporate into the rush of imagery. These elements are not used to sort things out, but rather to suggest the complexity of what the lived experience of homelessness might be. This radical fragmentation produces a form of speculative knowledge that never allows one to be seduced into the complacency of getting the complete picture. Unlike many makers of social documentary, Child never forces the complexity of the social problem of homelessness into the illusionistic verisimilitude of a whole picture or whole story by completing the images with contextualizing voice-overs or interviews. On the contrary, the film eschews language as a means of explaining and encapsulating the images. Still, the film is very much a sound film. The soundtrack is a kind of musique concrete creating a montage of overlapping urban sounds from the street, snippets of various kinds of instrumental music and conversation emphasizing the kaleidoscopic sensorium of the urban body.

At the same time, Child uses the fragmented montage that has become something of a trademark for her to produce a speculative and multifaceted psychological simulation of the experience of homelessness by combining factual and fictional elements. The film is structured as a fugue between the inquiring gaze of a camera looking from a distance at the social reality of an actual homeless encampment and a portrait of fictional characters who move in and out of the encampment. Child creates a virtual portrait of one of its inhabitants, making her inner world of dreams, desire and memories indistinguishable from the activities of the outer world around her. By speculating on the subjectivity of a middle-aged woman, Child further insists on the need to represent the problems of female desire and experience in a society that is at best marginalized and most often simply ignored. As such the film is deeply linked to earlier innovative feminist filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Chantal Akerman. As with Deren and Akerman, Child integrates fictional characters and narrative events within the quotidian to reveal aspects of women's lives that are less empirically accessible.

Child constructs a range of possible narrative episodes, which start up and end abruptly, and suggest a number of possible identities for the unnamed woman. In one, she is a working woman leaving the encampment carrying a briefcase. Other times she is hanging out on the street buying used shoes, washing her feet in a fire hydrant and taking food handouts from a Salvation Army truck. In another scene, there is a security guard moving through the encampment checking doors and locks, ultimately confronting the woman. There is the suggestion of sexual harassment, which in another possible scenario just as easily transpires into a consensual liaison between them. Child is constantly juxtaposing dehumanizing images of power with rehumanizing images of everyday life. Color images of locked doors, bulldozers plowing encampments into the ground, buildings on fire and police hassling civilians are intercut with black and white images of people playing, gardening and salvaging junk to resell. Sexual desire and the need for intimacy persists even in the constant exposure to the lurking brutality of life on the streets. Two women, one black and the other white, are repeatedly seen playing, fighting and making love with each other and, just as suddenly, the sleeping woman may appear as part of the tryst.

Throughout the film Child returns to images of the sleeping woman as a signal for the temporal disruptions of the film's fragmentation, allowing further temporal liberation from linearized narration, and opening into the virtual, producing relationships between an individual's experience and history. Halfway through the film, fragments of archival footage of what appears to be a colonial past are worked into Child's montage: black and white landscapes of the tropics, peasants working in cane fields, young girls in school uniforms. At times Child juxtaposes similar images of daily life in present day New York with these archival images of the past: people dancing in the street, folk dances from past rituals or the military rounding up peasants. It is through these images that Child is able to suggest a political history that connects with the woman's present circumstance. Through these images of a colonial past, the woman is seen as a subject of history and not simply a victim of her own lack of agency.

Along with this temporal reconfiguration of past and present, the fragmented world of B/side deterritorializes the space of the urban environment in which there are no longer strong boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, city and country. Central to this is the image of the Lower East Side as a space that exists between the highly developed first world, represented by the footage of New York City, and the underdeveloped third world, shown in the archival footage. We see Dinkinsville and the neighborhood around it not as a dying city, but rather as the natural world reemerging through the rubble. There are images of people gardening in empty lots and performing domestic tasks like washing clothes and bathing out in the open. We see people living among the trees and bushes in neglected empty spaces that were once tenements and now have become overgrown in the process of reverting to forests. The juxtaposition of these images next to idealized images of non-urban environments in the footage of the tropics, where we see picturesque vistas of palm trees and rural village life, allows for a sense of possible continuity between the woman's fantasy of an idealized past and the difficult reality of her present. Fantasy and reality are no longer simply closed off from one another. In this way the film also suggests the potential for new kinds of community in the midst of the great economic imbalances of a city like New York. It suggests new possibilities for the notion of "home" in a city in which the privatized locked-down world gives way to more open and collective ways of living. The film imagines this neighborhood as a settlement in which civilization is not ending but beginning again. It also suggests a more complex understanding of poor and marginal communities in which there is the potential for positive interaction and co-existence as well as the possibility for agency and growth through the creation of counter-cultures. The fictional elements of the film and the depiction of the woman's internal fantasy life creates new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of the material world that the often paternalistic analysis of the empirical social documentary cannot allow us to imagine.

This is not to suggest that Child's film romanticizes the squalor of one of the poorest communities in New York City, or the brutality of state policies toward the poor. The film ends with shots of the police marching into Dinkinsville to reclaim it for the city. A bulldozer is seen razing the area, returning the once inhabited encampment into a useless vacant lot. Child uses the utopian impulse of creative art making to move away from the singular iconography of hopelessness and impossibility commonly used to represent urban homelessness in the liberal imagination.

While the film shows that the inhabitants of Dinkinsville failed to create an ongoing and more permanent community, its brief existence shows the importance of counter-communities in the face of the enormous powers of the state. The film helps us imagine the possibility of turning the abjection of poverty into positive and even innovative forms of community where people are actively engaged in the creation of their own lives. It not only exemplifies the potential of the medium of cinema to render the complexity of social problems in new and complex ways, it also produces an indelible image of the potential for new forms of community.

B/side is distributed by Canyon Cinema, Inc., 2325 3rd St., suite 338, San Francisco, CA 94107; tel/fax [phone].

NOTES

1. For an excellent history of some of the projects on homelessness and gentrification in New York City see Gregory Sholette, "Nature as an Icon of Urban Resistance: Artists, Gentrification and New York City's Lower East Side 1979-1984," in Afterimage 25, no. 2, pp. 18-20.

2. For a more comprehensive look at activist video regarding urban housing struggles see Ernest Larsen, "Who Owns the Streets," in Art in America (January 1990), pp. 55-61.

JEFFREY SKOLLER writes frequently on contemporary film and is Assistant Professor of Filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.