Sidewalk Stories is a silent film shot in black and white on the streets of New York in 1989.

It was written, directed, and stars Charles Lane, who drew inspiration from the silent comedy

greats like Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd to make a present-day comedy about homelessness with a mostly African-American cast.

Lane plays the artist, an aspiring illustrator down on his luck,

who spends his days peddling portraits in Greenwich Village. At night, he sleeps in a makeshift apartment

in an abandoned tenement. His life dramatically changes in the course of a day when he's forced to take

care of a two-year-old toddler he found on the street. Lane, who originally hated silent movies, says

Sidewalk Stories was meant to be an experiment in pure cinema, a type of filmmaking that honors

film in its most elemental original form. He recently screened the film in honor of its

25th anniversary as part of the film independent at Lachma screening series,

and afterwards, joined Elvis Mitchell for the following conversation.

This podcast contains explicit language.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

I've always thought this is being, as I was saying in the introduction, such a subversive

film because it's so much about, in its way, black identity to me without having to speak

about it.

Yes.

And that's such a wild thing to do.

Yeah, you know, there was, and still there's a book called The Invisible Man by Ralph

Ellison.

Ellison, yeah.

And in the book, he speaks about, you know, the non-verbal or the symbolic invisibility

...