Filmmaker Puts City Changes In Focus

From Chapel West to Crown Street to the Hill to Wooster Square, New Haven’s construction boom is causing ripples in the city’s sense of place. For some, these moments of transition can be jarring; for others, they offer the perfect opportunity to reflect on the history and symbolism and social impact of New Haven’s physical landscape.

“Being able to document urban change is something that’s very interesting to me,” architectural historian and documentary filmmaker Elihu Rubin said in an interview on WNHH’s ​“Deep Focus” program. ​“How do we cope with urban change? How do we interpret it? And who are the agents of development and redevelopment? When do we feel empowered to participate in that, and when do we feel that things are just kind of happening?”

As an associate professor of urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture and as the driving force behind such innovative studies of New Haven as Interactive Crown Street and A People’s Guide to Infrastructure in New Haven, Rubin has dedicated much of his academic life to exploring these issues that form the very foundation of city life. But Rubin is also a filmmaker, intent on using documentaries as another tool for researching and communicating what it is like, and what it has been like, to live in the Elm City.

Soon after graduating from Yale College in 1999, Rubin and his then-classmate Elena Oxman founded American Beat, a documentary film group that aspired to make movies about the intersections of urban planning, economic development, and social activism in New Haven. Their first three movies, On Broadway (1999), Convergence (2001), and Next Question (2003), comprise a New Haven Trilogy of documentaries that tell a story about New Haven at the turn of the millennium. They look backward and forward in time to help reinforce the notion that the structure of cities is never preordained, but rather a conscious product of willful actors, monumental in scope but capable of change.

Below are excerpts from Rubin’s interview on ​“Deep Focus.” To listen to the complete conversation, click on the audio player at the bottom of the article.

Independent: Why did you want to make movies about New Haven?

Rubin: I’ve always been interested in architecture and urbanism and cities. Although I’m from the Boston area originally, I feel that you should work in the places that you live, and take advantage of that kind of access. I think it’s possible to have certain places that interest you in and of themselves, but for me, it’s as much about the methods of these forms of inquiry. If I were living in a different city, I would be doing the same sorts of projects in that city too.

Independent: What kind of impact do you as a filmmaker hope to have on the subjects of your documentaries?

Rubin: The most interesting documentary films to me are the ones that are the most nuanced, that leave the most to the audience to decide. I’m very interested in films about cities. A huge number of short videos about cities today are about, say, bike lanes. Well, they’re the most boring films in the world because you already know what the point is: build more bike lanes. That’s a perfectly valid point and one that we can debate, but I would prefer to make a film where you go to the street and you use the act of filmmaking as a tool of research. You don’t already know the answer, and you are there because you know something’s happening, something’s interesting, there’s something to figure out here, and something to share.

Independent: How did you and co-director Elena Oxman come to make On Broadway, the first movie in your New Haven Trilogy?

Rubin: It was very clear to everyone in New Haven in 1999 that there were dramatic changes happening on Broadway, because the great iconic sign of Cutler’s Record Store was being removed. There was also the demolition of a whole sequence of buildings, and I think it was the prospect of demolition that made us aware that we should start capturing things now, even if we didn’t know exactly where the story was going. Here was a main street with a lot of old businesses. The street was in a moment of transition, and it was becoming clear that a powerful agent was beginning to exert its vision in a somewhat monolithic way. What makes Main Street in general so interesting is cacophony: the perception of different buildings from different times with different owners with different styles. So it was the visual change that got us onto this story, and then we started to think about who to interview, and how we could unravel this story in a way that audiences would be able to understand at that time and hopefully afterwards too.

Independent: In your movies, teaching, and writing about urban planning, how do you balance the complexity of the problems that cities face with the demand for clear and simple solutions?

Rubin: I think the tension that you’re getting at is: how do we produce movies that are on the one hand critical, that ask us to examine the changes going on around us every day, and on the other hand are also progressive? How do we think about improvements? And how do we even identify what marks an improvement? City planning used to be very confident in what marked an improvement. Many of the large interventions from the high tide of confidence in urban planning in the 1950s and 60s led to some extremely ambitious interventions that many of us now regret and are trying to cover over and re-stitch. After that, planners took a much more modest perspective, saying that planning is listening to people. Planning is advocating for communities that aren’t otherwise represented. I think that planners involved in urban design have to be very critical about their perspective of progress, about who is included and who is excluded. Our film On Broadway wasn’t so much about improving the site. It was about coming to grips with urban character and a sense of place. What is character? What does it mean when we find a place to be charming or appealing, or difficult or stressful? What are the elements that make up that impression?

Independent: The second movie in the New Haven Trilogy, Convergence, uses a musical performance orchestrated by composer Neely Bruce as a means of looking at the history and symbolism of the New Haven Green. Do you think of this movie as a story of loss? As a story nostalgic for a time when everyone had to come to the Green to participate in civic life?

Rubin: I think that there was a time when physical public space was the most important medium for information transfer. Today, the virtual world has made incredible kinds of public conversations available. But have we lost something in overlooking the physical in the public realm? There was a time when people lived closer to the Green, when people did their shopping on the Green. It was a place where everyone went to represent themselves as a citizen of New Haven. Technology has changed a lot of that. But, to a certain extent, the Green has really retained that role. It’s actually an incredibly resilient and important public space. I try to de-familiarize myself with it every time I walk by, to observe the specialness of having this central square of 9 as a common space for the entire city.

Independent: The last movie in the New Haven Trilogy is Next Question. What’s this movie about?

Rubin: Next Question follows a group of New Haven high school students who participated in an oral history project for the Festival of Arts and Ideas back in 2003. These students moved around the city and brought people to the festival’s offices to discuss the happenings around May Day 1970, which was the trial of Bobby Seale and Erika Huggins and others in New Haven for the murder of Alex Rackley. But the movie is really about the transmission of a kind of lost history. It’s about these students discovering a missing link in terms of thinking about civil rights, of thinking about equity, of thinking about belonging and citizenship in this city. It’s about thinking through issues that are just as important today as they were 15 years ago, or 50 years ago.

Independent: How did watching these students discover this story affect the way you think about the Black Panthers trial, and about the history of race relations in this city more broadly?

Rubin: One of the great things about this project was bringing students right to the center of downtown, because in and of itself it was a kind of invitation to students from the neighborhoods to feel central to the social and cultural life of the city. But the importance of the project for me was also about honoring our elders. There’s a sense that too often in American society we don’t really know what to do with our old people. The elderly in cities have problems of mobility and inclusion and access to services. Sometimes, just being asked questions is enough to make people feel valued, and to help transmit experiences.

Independent: New Haven’s going through a serious construction boom right now, a lot of it taking place downtown. If you were making a movie about Crown Street, which you’ve studied extensively, what’s the story you’d want to tell?

Rubin: The big story on Crown Street right now is housing: the incredible number of units that are going up, and this image of central New Haven as a highly desirable place for people who can afford to pay market-rate rents. It’s a very complicated story. It implies economic activity and jobs. I think there’s also a tremendous amount of nostalgia and misgiving for, on the one hand, any kind of change at all, and on the other, for the idea of displacement. It is a moment when the identity of the city and its sense of place is in flux. I’m very sad to see the loss of some things, like the Salvation Army store and its adult rehabilitation center. Why should it be so important that we have an adult rehabilitation center near the center of the city? Well, it should be because cities should be places where people from all backgrounds and all circumstances in society are able to get services. The idea here is that cities, streets, public spaces, they’re not always pleasant, happy spaces. Public spaces are difficult, and maybe they should be difficult, because they talk to us about what’s going on in our community.

The New Haven Trilogy is available to rent at the New Haven Public Library and Best Video in Hamden. Learn more at https://americanbeatfilms.wordpress.com/.