Bay Area filmmaker/poet/painter Paula Gladstone returned to the place where she was born and raised to make this ambitious, hour-long “documentary” - a journey through three seasons of changing light, population and movement in Coney Island, New York. “It's a hurdy-gurdy kind of place,” says one lifelong Coney Island resident: in summer, a parade of sweltering, half-clothed bodies (city-pale or city-black); in winter, an icy haven for loners seeking the company of other loners. A playground. A (last) resort on the edge of New York City.
Shooting silent in super-8, Gladstone focuses on the area under the boardwalk, where bars of light passing through the slats and onto the sand, filmed against the receding perspective of the boardwalk, suggest a netherworld, an infinity. The walking people move into the light and disappear; a child throws sand into the rays in a quiet trance; a body builder works alone in the snow.
The film's added soundtrack - including the music of Alice Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Anthony Braxton, as well as Gladstone's own gritty, very immediate and sexual poems - while on one level painstakingly integrated, remains on another a separate structure effectively heightening the eerily silent images.
Hiding neither her role as a filmmaker nor the artifice involved (sounds from a shooting gallery form a filmic pun with the image of the oblivious walkers), Gladstone rather emphasizes the relationship between herself as artist (and former Coney Island resident) and the people she is filming.