"Blowjob? Who gives a shit?" That was Terminal Bar manager and bartender Sheldon Nadelman's way of reacting to his customers' occasional indiscretions. In the new documentary Terminal Bar by his son Stefan Nadelman, Sheldon here is describing a customer who bar-owner (and Sheldon's father-in-law) Murray Goldman would have preferred to be banned from the Terminal Bar after the customer was caught giving a blowjob in the bathroom. Sheldon's reasoning, however, was: "If you're funny, I'll put up with you."

The story is illustrated, like so many others, with a photo of the customer that was taken by Sheldon. Sheldon's collection of black-and-white photographs makes up the bulk of the visual wonders in Terminal Bar. The photos prove: Everyone has a history.

Stefan's approach to the history of the Terminal Bar, which closed in 1982, is as open-hearted as his father's principles and pictures. Inspired, no doubt, by his family legacy, Stefan engages the viewer with an exciting perspective on the Terminal Bar, the history of which wouldn't earn a footnote in a History textbook. Stefan finds expansive history in what is, essentially, his own story. Even at a fleet 22 minutes, Terminal Bar is a deeply humbling experience.

Learning about the changes undergone by the Terminal Bar, located at Eighth and 41st Street, one gets a larger sense of a changing New York City and American urban culture. Originally serving an Irish-American clientele when Goldman acquired it in 1958, the eventual dwindling of business invited a "new wave" of people seeking solace from urban despair and loneliness.

While Sheldon worked at the Terminal Bar from 1972 to 1982, it was a bar frequented by Black gay men. Such customers are the subjects of most of Stefan's photographs (along with the old-timers who didn't notice or didn't mind the changes). Through those photos and Sheldon's recollections, "Terminal Bar" becomes an expose on a specific subculture. However, because it's so personal, Terminal Bar renders history through compassion. The direct stare into the camera that typifies most of Sheldon's portraitures acknowledges the relationship between subject and photographer. Here, it's not an artistic conceit: it conveys the truth about the social forces that brought them together. The Terminal Bar depended on its clients, and its clients needed the bar. Terminal Bar proposes a new way of thinking about how history works.

In many ways, history itself is the subject of Terminal Bar. Stefan quotes, visually and through voice-over narration by Tom Clifford, two news articles about the Terminal Bar: The Roughest Bar In Town by Orde Coombs, published in 1980; and Terminal Bar, Eighth Avenue: The End Is Near by Peter Genovese, published in 1982. Those are examples of "official" history, juxtaposed by Stefan's video documentary with the personal approaches of Sheldon's photography and oral reminiscences.

Stefan's use of the photographs (with video) in Terminal Bar not only repeats Sheldon's record of history. It also represents a son and a citizen trying to understand his own legacy. In that sense, Terminal Bar is also a history of a family. The profound social vision Stefan evidences goes even further. The spectator of Terminal Bar thrills to Stefan's discovery, while recognizing his/her own relationship to that history.

To express his story and to challenge the video audience to rethink its relationship to history, Stefan develops an impressive - exhilarating - technique. He uses the flexibility of digital video technology to make every photograph resonate even as he forces the spectator to adjust his/her vision to the speedy delivery of information.

Often the photographs vibrate with life as they form geometric designs (squares, rectangles, zigzags) across the screen. Stefan deconstructs or animates the images, always heightening and improving perception. He succeeds in conveying the feeling of history and life as both eternal (photographs) and fleeting (video's temporal manipulations). That is why I call "Terminal Bar" a "humbling experience."

Ah, but Terminal Bar also dances! The techno beats orchestrated by Dick Zved, Steve Rossiter, and Michael Reid bring the choreography of the images directly into the spectator's space. Stefan intends to provoke communal response. The final image of Terminal Bar promises: "To be continued. . ." On the screen? Hopefully. In life, too? That is up to all of us.

http://www.gaytoday.com/entertain/012703en.asp