Dream City (1986)

My photo/video website:
http://stevensiegelphotographer.com/i...

About "Dream City":

"Dream City" is a documentary short film of New York in the 1980s. The film includes rare historic footage (shot by Siegel) of 1980's New York, including footage of the subways, the parks, Times Square and other neighborhoods. The film is narrated by teenagers of that era.

"Dream City" has won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival and the Houston Film Festival. It was recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 2017, New York Public Radio's on-line magazine, Gothamist, featured an article on the film, entitled, "Spend 17 Minutes In 1980s NYC With One Of The Decade's Best Photographers." The full text of the article may be found here:

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainm...

The Gothamist article included an interview with Siegel. The following is the text of the interview:

Q. What was your overall vision/goal with "Dream City"?

I made the film in the mid-1980s, which, of course, was a difficult and troubled time for New York. Just a few years previously, the city had barely avoided bankruptcy. In the '80s the city was slowly recovering from its fiscal crisis. It was also a time when the city was suffering from the twin social crises of crack and AIDS—which exacted a terrible toll on some neighborhoods. This is the backdrop of the film.

In "Dream City," I tried to fuse together some elements of experimental film and some elements of the traditional documentary film. The experimental visual elements are something of a 1980s version of a venerable film genre that is sometimes referred to as a "city symphony." That label applies to experimental films dating from the silent era that were devoted to a day in the life of a city. The most famous example of this genre is Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" (1929).

The "city symphonies" of the 1920s were short silent films that were accompanied by music. "Dream City" was somewhat different in that it melded a soundtrack that uses music but also used more traditional documentary elements like voice-over interviews and ambient sound effects. Some of the tension of the film derives from its experimental visuals and more conventional documentary soundtrack. However, the film does not include on-camera interviews of people—that would have broken the seamless visual spell of the city symphony.

What I was going for was a dense soundtrack that complemented the dense imagery... and that "grounded" the imagery to some extent but not entirely. The subjects of the voice-over interviews acted like narrators... or more specifically as "tour guides" of the city that lead the viewer through neighborhoods from the South Bronx to Times Square... all interconnected by subways. But sometimes the "tour guides" were silent—that is, the "documentary element" disappeared entirely—and the pure visual "city symphony" took over completely.

The choice of the title, "Dream City," was meant to invoke several ideas. It suggested the dreams of the teenagers for a better city. But it also was meant to invoke the form of the film—a quasi-narrative that moved with the interconnected logic of a dream but also employed a dream's occasional visual nonsequiteurs and surreal juxtapositions. I was going for a kind of visual storytelling that lies somewhere between (on the one hand) a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of unrelated images that is the hallmark of some experimental films and (on the other hand) a tight narrative structure that is associated with most conventional fiction and documentary films. That middle ground of visual storytelling is a "sweet spot" that is very hard to achieve and sustain.

I also aimed for a "middle ground" in the tone underlying my treatment of the subject. The visuals of the film were dominated by gritty and depressing subject matter. But the voice-over narration of the teenagers was often hopeful and optimistic. My aim was to show the indomitable spirit of New Yorkers in the face of adversity. Then too, this sometimes jarring counterpoint may have furthered the overall dream-like ethos.


Q. Any thoughts and reflections about the film thirty years later?

So much in the city has changed. Times Square has become a haven for tourists. The burned-out precincts of the South Bronx are gone—replaced by occupied affordable housing and parks. Of course, the fact that so much of the superficial depravity of the city has disappeared does not mean that the human misery has disappeared along with it—it has just become less visible. It exists behind closed doors. And gentrification represents a very different threat to the vitality of the city than the threats of the 1980s. But there is no denying that the city was a vastly different place and contemporary New York is a vastly better place. I would hope that "Dream City" shows that this is so.