Still Gowanus

“I wanted it to feel like what it felt like for me to live in a neighborhood and have this happening,” filmmaker Jamie Courville told the audience of roughly fifty people at a screening of selected scenes from Gowanus Current. By “this,” Courville meant the eponymous neighborhood’s Superfund cleanup, contentious rezoning, and ongoing transformation from a heavily polluted post-industrial waterway to a dense agglomeration of residential blocks. “I’m a big believer in show, don’t tell.”

To that point, Courville and Chris Reynolds, her partner in life and work, opted to forgo interviews and voiceovers in their forthcoming feature-length documentary, in order to present an objective portrait of the neighborhood in flux. During the informal post-screening Q&A, Reynolds dubbed it “civic cinema, [showing] how this debate played out in the public realm,” noting that they filmed almost exclusively at publicly accessible sites.

For the “first look,” which was free and open to the public, the filmmakers assembled a tantalizing eleven-minute edit of scenes intended to serve as a representative sample of the doc. Shot over the course of a decade, from August 2013 (“just before the Whole Foods opened”) to earlier this year, clips of community meetings and protests alternated with artful b-roll of an excavator dredging bituminous “black mayonnaise”; active construction sites in the middle distance; onyx water pocked with iridescent oil slicks; the fences that currently surround many blocks in the neighborhood, etc. “We tried not to include too much New York-specific detail,” Reynolds explained. “These are things that people are dealing with in a lot of communities.”

Where Allison Prete took a more conventional approach in her 1999 documentary Lavender Lake, Gowanus Current, for all its vérité visuals and implicit narratives, equally represents both a historic snapshot and a point of view. Per Reynolds, “It’s up to us to say, ‘This is what a community trying to make a change looks like.’”