4.6 • 639 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2014
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Contains explicit language. Charles Lane, creator of "Sidewalk Stories" on how he went from hating silent movies, to making one, in black and white.
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0:00.0 | Sidewalk Stories is a silent film shot in black and white on the streets of New York in 1989. |
0:05.4 | It was written, directed, and stars Charles Lane, who drew inspiration from the silent comedy |
0:11.2 | greats like Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd to make a present-day comedy about homelessness with a mostly African-American cast. |
0:19.2 | Lane plays the artist, an aspiring illustrator down on his luck, |
0:22.6 | who spends his days peddling portraits in Greenwich Village. At night, he sleeps in a makeshift apartment |
0:27.5 | in an abandoned tenement. His life dramatically changes in the course of a day when he's forced to take |
0:32.6 | care of a two-year-old toddler he found on the street. Lane, who originally hated silent movies, says |
0:39.4 | Sidewalk Stories was meant to be an experiment in pure cinema, a type of filmmaking that honors |
0:45.0 | film in its most elemental original form. He recently screened the film in honor of its |
0:50.7 | 25th anniversary as part of the film independent at Lachma screening series, |
0:55.0 | and afterwards, joined Elvis Mitchell for the following conversation. |
0:59.4 | This podcast contains explicit language. |
1:05.1 | Thank you very much. Thank you. |
1:08.0 | I've always thought this is being, as I was saying in the introduction, such a subversive |
1:12.1 | film because it's so much about, in its way, black identity to me without having to speak |
1:19.0 | about it. |
1:20.0 | Yes. |
1:21.0 | And that's such a wild thing to do. |
1:22.9 | Yeah, you know, there was, and still there's a book called The Invisible Man by Ralph |
1:30.6 | Ellison. |
1:31.1 | Ellison, yeah. |
1:32.1 | And in the book, he speaks about, you know, the non-verbal or the symbolic invisibility |
... |
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