Terminal Bar
Directed
by Stefan Nadelman
"I'm trying to tell people what's happening. If you
don't put it down on paper nobody knows." That's an ironic commentary
for Terminal Bar, the finest documentary you're likely to see this
year. Showing Oct. 17 as part of Resfest, the digital film festival
at the New School, Terminal Bar justifies the digital video medium
as a means of genuine storytelling and fact-finding---not simply a Hollywood
shortcut.Working
from early-80s articles by journalists Peter Genovese and Orde Coombs
about the closing of "the roughest bar in town," director Stefan Nadelman
moves from the printed word to digital video, bringing knowledge and
empathy to history. There's home-movie satisfaction in Nadelman's
recording his father Sheldon talk about the Times Square bar (once
located across the street from Port Authority) that was owned and
run by his grandfather, Murray Goldman. As the Terminal Bar's manager-and
amateur sociologist-Sheldon spent its last 10 years photographing
the patrons. Nadelman uses his father's cache of photographs as a
human archive. Every split-screen montage and pop-up image conveys
the son's excited discovery, so that Terminal Bar swells into a vibrant
social document. Its unique power comes from not panhandling for our
emotions about the city's defeated folk. Instead, Nadelman (through
digital video) demonstrates the depth of response that can come from
personally observing urban tragedy. Sheldon recalls how the Terminal
changed from an Irish hangout to a lost-and-never-found for the city's
human wreckage. "The streets will eat you alive," he says knowingly.
In 22 minutes this great big New York history lesson also traces the
continuity of the Nadelman family through the tradition of compassion.
As clientele changed (along with the neighborhood), Terminal attracted
new bruisers, new ethnicities, new desperados. "You wanna stay in
business? If it's gay, it's gay. You go with the flow," Sheldon reasoned.
Like an update of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Terminal Bar catalogs
a panoply of lost hopes. Many of Sheldon's patrons were "big husky
black men. They have a few drinks, they all become sissies." That's
not hostility, but a reality even O'Neill left out-a trenchant view
of people who have trouble making it in society looking for respite,
hiding from themselves, running from indifference.
Care describes Sheldon's portraits-they're not demeaning candid shots.
The act of numbering these must have moved him just as the evidence
of numbered men-an inventory of desperation-takes a viewer's breath
away. This census of faces creates a montage effect as good as Godard's
Histoires du Cinema. Nadelman proves adept at video composition. No
matter how fancy his editing, Terminal Bar's portraits remain haunting.
It may not get support from the Nan Goldin-Larry Clark hipperati simply
because you can't fantasize about these photos, pitying or envying
decadence. Each person who looked into Sheldon's camera also looks
right at you. They look into that part of every New Yorker who, daily,
fends off the nightmare of failure, dereliction and anonymity. Time
Square's Disneyfication has not built over this fear; there is still
dirt in the folds and creases of the fancy new alteration. But Terminal
Bar gives lost people an identity viewers can share. Call it punch-drunk
humanism. As Sheldon remarks, "When one person's lying in the street,
everybody's lying in the street."
