Posted Jul 25, 2023, 7:45 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: The Bay
Posts: 8,808
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Quote:
Unauthorized BART film sells out San Francisco theater
By Timothy Karoff
July 25, 2023
Last Tuesday night, people packed into a sold-out Roxie Theater to see what BART operators look at every day: the view from the front of the train.
In the opening voiceover to “Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride,” director Vincent Woo reads an invocation: “The landscape whizzes by as if you’re gliding through space like some kind of no-clipping ghost. Still, one thing bothers you: You can only see to the side.”
“Tunnel Vision” grew out of this curiosity. Armed with a suction cup, two GoPros (one was lost between San Bruno and Daly City), and a good-natured sense of mischief, Woo fastened a video camera to the front of a northbound train at SFO. He then rode the train 90 minutes to Pittsburg/Bay Point, where he hopped out, snagged his camera and took the footage home (after an awkward confrontation with a train operator). Over the point-of-view footage, Woo narrates bits of BART's history, interviews a train operator and even speaks with state Sen. Scott Wiener about the system’s funding crisis.
Woo, who is 34, has lived in the Bay Area for nearly his entire life. Before “Tunnel Vision,” he used to mount GoPros on Muni bike racks to capture the view from the front of the bus. “The footage wasn't as good because it just looks like you're driving a car,” he told SFGATE. “It's not otherworldly the way the BART footage is.”
“Otherworldly” is the right word. With their metal pipes and stained concrete walls, BART tunnels look like something out of a steampunk lair. As the train screams past regularly spaced fluorescent lights, the tunnel pulses with an orange glow; in the distance, light from the tunnel's mouth flares in the shape of a star. And finally, there’s the sound: a dull, grinding hum, constant but endlessly modulating.
Still, the best part of the experience was not the surreal footage but the chance to share it with an enthusiastic audience. The crowd was peppered with San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency merchandise: Muni hoodies and BART beanies and Christmas sweaters. When the train pulled into a station, the audience sometimes clapped and cheered. (16th and Mission got the most cheers. I tried to start a round of applause at Powell Street, but it didn’t catch on.) A man sitting in front of me began headbanging to the chime of the closing doors. On the tracks, these elements of public transit are banalities, but here in a dark theater, they became inside jokes, shared points of pride.
Near the start of the film, Woo interviews Michael Healy, who worked as BART’s director of public affairs from 1971 to 2005. (Healy also authored “BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System,” which Woo referred to fondly in our interview.) While the train travels from Balboa Park to Glen Park, Woo asks Healy, “Is there some aspect of BART that you think is particularly underappreciated by the public?”
“Yeah,” Healy laughs. “I would say the entire system.”
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https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/ar...P-CP-Spotlight
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