GOWANUS BROADSIDE Video. Black and White. 90 minutes. The Gowanus Canal is a 2 mile long waterway extending from the Bay of New York into the south of Brooklyn. Once a marsh, then the principle cargo port of the borough, the canal quickly became one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. In 2010 the canal was designated a Superfund site. A major cleanup is just getting underway. Surrounded by old warehouses, disused industrial sites, and vacant land, this vestige of a center of economic activity, in which nature is now reinserting itself, is a landscape that interrogates the concept and expression of Place. GOWANUS BROADSIDE follows the marginal spaces bordering the length of the canal, recording the spatial and sonorous qualities of this waterway’s cut into the urban space. A doubled movement of rotation and progression brings forward attributes of contingency, temporality, and indexicality central to cinematic expression of place. |