Philip Maglieri wants to make a good impression. He definitely doesn’t want me to let you know that his dedication to The Alley is so formidable that he braved my prodding questions curled up in a blanket with a head cold, while breaking clothespins. I think he absentmindedly broke like five of them. (What the hell is that about? Who even uses clothespins anymore?)
“I think I’m Jesus and I want to start saving the world with this alleyway,” Maglieri tells me, leaning back in his chair. He’s devoted the last two years of his life to filming a documentary about the alleyway next to his residence and studio on Queen and Spadina. You know, the alleyway that all the hobos and crackheads pee in when they’re refused at McDonald’s – that’s the one we’re talking about. The same alleyway that kids in the Alex Park neighbourhood pass through to go to school, the same alleyway that junkies do drugs in. Such a wide variety of regulars makes for an interesting dynamic, and Maglieri explores this in his 30-minute documentary, appropriately titled The Alley (click to see the trailer).
Smoking crack!
UKB: Tell me about the birth of this project.
PM: I’ve lived next to the alley for about six years, and I hear everything that happens in there even though I’m three floors above it – there’s been this constant intrusion from the outside, into my home and my business, so the idea of filming what happens there was a logical choice for me. The actual origin of the project happened one day over breakfast, with my girlfriend, the co-producer of the film. We’d been kept up, like we often are, by noise in the alleyway, and we decided to put some cameras up and see what happened. The results we got – I’m not sure if they were shocking, but they were surprising in some ways, for sure.
It’s amazing what happens when you look at a place for a really long time, especially a space like an alleyway, which most people just ignore. Sifting through hours upon hours of motion controlled security camera footage really made me see the space in a new light. I think with any film project it’s important to do some degree of research, and this led us to interview people who use the alleyway on a daily basis – public figures. In The Alley we speak with a city counsellor, a cop, an urban planner, a community centre director, on what the alley means to the community.
Check out that stream! Dude's a champ!
What material was on those first tapes that you recorded?
The first stuff we shot was on a Saturday night, and I actually put a small camera in the alley, at about eye-level. It was duct-taped crudely to a pipe, and it just recorded straight through the night. From that footage I’d say we captured about maybe 5 or 6 people urinating. And it illustrated the variety of people that use the space – people on their way to work, young children on their way to school, business owners on their way to Spadina, people skateboarding or riding their bikes through, clubbers walking home in the early morning.
The alleyway and the neighbourhood itself is right on the border of several other neighbourhoods (Chinatown, the fashion district, Alexander Park) and the alley marks the end of this gentrification sprawl that’s making its way north on Spadina. So in that way, it’s used by members of all these different communities. It’s truly an orphaned public space, primarily because the land parcel sizes are uneven, and the landlords are relatively old school. We’re talking about Chinese immigrants and Jewish immigrants and in this case they’ve been feuding for generations, and they’re reluctant to sell to one another because as soon as these three properties are sold, a developer could move in here and build something substantial. But they all want to be the one to make that sale, so in the meantime they’re just holding onto their properties. In this case they tend to dislike and mistrust one another and that’s led to a blame game being played with the alleyway – one landlord won’t put up a light until the other one does. The ownership of the alley itself is in dispute, so maintainance doesn’t happen often even though all of these landlords have a vested interest in keeping their property and the outlying area of their property in good order, they tend not to.
The only people I’ve seen maintain it are the Magders, who don’t own the alleyway – Paul Magder is especially the reason we have Sunday shopping in Ontario. He stayed open in the 80s and decided it was more financially realistic for him to pay the fines than it was to not open, especially during the boom of the fur business, but at any rate, him or his sons get out there and clean it up every once in a while.
In case you can't make it out, the white guy is holding the black guy's dick so the woman can work some magic. For drugs!
That’s an interesting interplay between private and public space. What effect does this dispute have on the alley?
The ownership dispute of the alley is an interesting one. Although it may technically belong to one landlord, it’s used as a public throughway and has been used as such for as long as anyone can remember. Cutting this alleyway off would be to cut off a main artery for people on their way to work or school. I think these alleyways are endemic of something that you see a lot in big cities. When the shops close down and people go back to their homes in the suburbs, it’s an invitation for antisocial behaviour to happen in these narrow, hidden spaces that stray off the beaten path. the windows of the buildings on either side of this alleyway, have been bricked over on ground level. which further limits the visibility onto the space, and reduces its ability to be monitored.
One thing we found in filming is that it attracts all kinds of groups. It’s not necessarily blacks or whites or Chinese, and I wouldn’t even say it’s certain classes, necessarily. It’s simply because it is a narrowed and darkened space that people are comfortable acting in antisocial ways. You have people pissing against the wall and doing their drug deals and smoking their drugs. A lot of the problems of the space are actually imported. I think it’s erroneous to assume that because this is a rundown neighbourhood in Toronto, all the bad stuff that happens there is from Toronto. The people who urinate there are many times people from outside of the city who come in to attend an event at an afterhours club or bar.
I would say some of the drug activity is also from outside of Toronto. You get these pseudo-homeless kids that are traveling the country that make use of this space, and not all of these uses of it are antisocial or illicit. I think at a very basic level, this alleyway and spaces like it represent a home of sorts for people that spend a lot of time on the streets. People who don’t have a home with a bathroom will use it as their washroom, and I suppose in some sense there’s almost a courtesy there that they would use a public space like this – somewhere that is in some way hidden.
"Visual poetry."
The film has some contemplative moments which the film’s website deems ‘visual poetry’. Why did you decide to include these snippets rather than take a more conventional documentarian approach and fill the entire thing from brim to brim with talking heads?
Aside from being this magnet for illicit behaviours, the alleyway is also a part of the urban landscape. There’s something appealing about that. I like the way the sun rises and sets in the summertime; it seems to follow the axis of the alleyway directly so you get this incredible variation of light and shadow from morning until night. The play of light on the walls is fantastic at some times of the day, and at other times it can look rather mundane or sinister. There’s a drama to this space that I felt was worth capturing on film.
I spent a lot of time camped out in the back seat of a car, and sometimes behind a garbage bin, trying to film the alleyway discretely with a long lens. In those cases I just sat there and let the camera roll. I had four security cameras installed, which were linked to motion-capture software. They were triggered when there was any movement to limit the amount of false starts. Sometimes I’d take those cameras off motion-control and let them record at a low frame rate, primarily to see for myself what the changes were over a twenty-four hour period.
The cameras posed an interesting risk as well – when mounting them I was aware that I was being seen by people who might take offense to being filmed in the alleyway. At one point I was questioned and threatened by a street person when I set up a camera. It was really late and really dark in the alley, and I was setting it up, and confronted in the middle of the alleyway. It almost got violent – it didn’t. In watching some of the footage afterwards you can see that people have noticed where the hidden cameras are. There are instance where people will warn their friends that there’s a camera there. In fact, some of the graffiti in the alleyway seemed to be put up as a warning that this area was being filmed. Eventually I stuck the cameras out there in plain sight – they’re night vision cameras, so at night time in the dark there’s a red ring of the infared bulbs inside that anyone can see. Strangely enough it didn’t really change a lot of what I observed in the alleyway. People would see the cameras and continue doing whatever it was they were doing.
And back to visual poetry – what do you have to say about the film’s more quiet moments?
Regardless of what connotations that phrase has, I think there is poetic quality in the aesthetics of the space – the light and the shadow, but also in the way that it’s used. I think the relationship between its function and its intentions as well as its cover for illicit behaviour. Those two ideas and sensibilities are constantly coming up against one another in this little narrow space. You’ve got a one-hundred year old Chinese woman carrying her groceries home and some street kid doing a drug deal coming face to face, and a Jewish furrier walking by moments afterward when someone is peeing there. I think there’s a human poetry there.
Aww.
You left a lot of material out of the final cut of the film. What’s the reasoning behind that, and can you tell us about the content you left out?
The film could have been an entry point for a much broader film. You have these communities butting up against one another and that’s interesting unto itself. I found in the editing process that the further we got away from things that directly related to the alleyway, the less cohesive the film felt. I wanted to make a more powerful short film as opposed to a broader but perhaps less interesting film. I’m saying this with some self-doubt, as there are so many interesting angles to explore that either start or finish with the alley.
This dude is an asshole.
You mentioned not wanting to include bits about the Alex Park neighbourhood for fear of wandering off topic?
Yes. Alex Park is the community housing project erected in the 1960s directly behind the alleyway. Residents in that community are oftentimes pidgeonholed as being criminal, and I suppose I wanted to question the fairness of that given that the crime I’ve seen in the alleyway both in the film and living here during the time that I have indicates to me that maybe 80-90% of the crime I’ve seen in there is not related to alex park, despite its proximity.The alley is often used as an escape route by criminals for the obvious reason that it can get you from one main city street onto a smaller one which gives someone several options as to where they want to run. I imagine in many cases some people will run into Alex Park given its maze-like design. Any criminal worth his salt knows that the cops won’t enter there and are reluctant to enter unless they’re en masse, because they feel threatened. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the criminal who is running into Alex Park lives in Alex Park. In many cases, that’s the assumption that’s made.
The link to the alley here is that this run down, short stretch of land is on the periphery and it’s used by Alex Park residents to get out on Spadina to get to Chinatown, to walk down to Queen street, and most importantly for the kids of Alex Park who walk through it on their way to school, which is across the street. This adds to the stigmatization and the feeling of being abandoned, which I think many of the Alex Park residents must feel. But as you can see, there’s another film here.
The one other thing I’d say is that the alley falls between two police districts, 14th and 52nd – so chasing someone through that alley at the very least creates a beaurocratic problem. The communication lag between the two divisions in some instances could provide an extra few minutes for a criminal to get away, so in that way the alley is contributing to a policing issue.
School kids.
Is there any particular audience you intended for the film, or any people you would like to see it?
I think that although the film deals with a very Toronto-centric issue, the theme of abandoned public space applies to any city. I think the people who will be most interested in seeing it will be people who live or work around these spaces, and are interested in public space in general.
Kids throwing rocks at the camera.
Would you like the film to result in some sort of positive change in the community, or did you intend it as commentary rather than a call to action?
That’s a very good question, one that I’ve gone back & forth on. I think on one hand, making a purely observational film is valuable enough in itself. I’ve been very cautious about my presence in the film – I wasn’t interested, for instance, in using my story or my voice over to tell the story of this alleyway. And I think that if we as filmmakers had the ability to start making changes that we thought applicable to the space and filming it without the community’s involvement or consent, that would be inserting ourselves into the film in the same way as making the film about us. The film is about the community, about the alleyway.
I think that the call to action could come from a web component that would pool opinions as to what people would like to see done in the alleyway in the most democratic way possible, and that funds from the film could be used to improve the space. Some kind of intervention is important, and as Adam Vaughn says in the film, making the space better could be done relatively easily. I don’t know if it’s the film’s responsibility to do that. I do think its important for the film to be a tool of social change. I don’t want to be too didactic or preachy with the film, I want there to be moments that are worth looking at for the sake of looking at those moments, and if people decide they want to do something with that, then great.
Bicyclists dodge human waste and drug remains.
The Alley raises a lot of questions and ideas that are not in any way resolved. Would you like resolution, or do you intend to leave the alley open-ended?
Given everything that I’ve seen in the alleyway and the fact that I’m directly effected by living here – for instance, in the summertime the smell of urine is pugnant, and the sound of people pissing in the alleyway isn’t the most appealing thing – it would be impossible not to try and do something. Is there a resolution per se? No. I don’t think that any one solution is possible to all of the problems in the space. I think it can be cleaner and safer, and I think it can be done quite easily.
The alley.
What solutions do you see in the future?
I would be most curious to see what would happen if the alley were beautified, and by that I mean a mural or a mosaic, and I think it definitely needs a light or two. I’d be curious to know what effect that would have, if people were indeed less inclined to drop their garbage, urinate, do their drugs in a space that appeared more delicate. There’s a large graffiti mural in the parking lot behind the alleyway, that was put up last summer (ED NOTE: this mural was done by HSA Crew from Toronto) and so far no one has tagged over it; it’s this beautiful elaborate piece that no one has felt compelled to go and fuck with. I don’t think the problems in the alleyway rely on institutional solutions (bright lights/surveillance cameras), having already seen first hand that cameras have done little to change behaviours in the alley. There are people in the community who are more than willing to contribute to painting a mural or cleaning it up; it’s just a matter of focusing their interest.
She couldn't fucking help it.
If people would like to view The Alley, how would they do so?
At the moment we’re concentrating on getting into festivals, although we will be doing some pre-screenings and ultimately the film will be available for download on the website.
Are you aware of any other films that are devoted solely to the documentation of space?
There’s a film called Doing Time in Times Square that was shot during the 1980s – pre-Guilliani New York. A middle class white guy leans out his window with a videocamera filming the outside space – crime, prostitution, fights, you name it – which he contrasts with the inside of his apartment. We see his young family, his kid’s one year old birthday – the transition between the two very different environments works nicely. I saw that film in the middle of shooting this one, and it was interesting to see someone else having done something similar, although ultimately I decided not to contrast what we see outside with what happens inside. I was interested more in what goes on outdoors rather than what goes on in my life, inside my space. I’m more interested in the space outdoors and the people who frequent it.
I’m obsessed with documentaries, and I happen to live a five minute walk away from the infamous alley – it should go without saying that I loved Maglieri’s film. It showed a new side to a slab of concrete that I walk past every other day, thinking nothing of it. The Alley is an interesting film about Toronto, about people, about cities – it’s short, but definitely worth seeing.
3 Comments
1 Ivan wrote:
This is a great interview. I’ve been lucky enough to see this film and the layers of human experience contained in the alley’s narrow walls have been beautifully captured. There is no value judgment made about the people or the space in the presentation and that’s a testament to the humanity of the film makers.
2 iamlaura wrote:
thanks for the great write up. the clothespin mystery has plagued me for a long time too.
3 KillerKiki wrote:
This film is highly stimulating to an artistic mind, as well as shocking on a sociological level. I love the juxtaposition of the two. It will do well for you Philip.
xo
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