Digital Video magazine — July 2013
Neighborhood Watch: Su Friedrich Follows the Evolution (and Devolution) of Brooklyn for ‘Gut Renovation’

In the late 1980s, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg was a working class neighborhood populated by small manufacturers, family-owned butchers and auto repair shops. The city’s bohemians — artists, writers and filmmakers — began to filter into the area, establishing themselves in commercial loft spaces built out with DIY ingenuity and old-fashioned elbow grease. Williamsburg landlords turned a blind eye, and an artistic community blossomed and thrived. Then, in 2005, the neighborhood began to change.

While New York’s trendy SoHo district took 30 years to make the transition from artists’ haven to art gallery hotspot to outdoor shopping mall, Williamsburg — the victim of new zoning laws and tax subsidies — in just eight short years underwent a rapid transformation that pushed out generations of local, independent businesses and a community of artists spanning a quarter century.

Documentary feature Gut Renovation, by independent filmmaker Su Friedrich and co-writer Cathy Quinlan, records the neighborhood’s transformation from an artists’ refuge to the sleek and moneyed hipster paradise it has become today.

Friedrich, who has been making experimental, personal documentaries since the late 1970s, and has received retrospectives at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, and the National Film Theater in London, has taught film and video production at Princeton since 1998. She spent five years documenting the changes in the area between New York’s East River and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, showing the demolition of industrial buildings, watching old tenants leave, and keeping meticulous record of developments. One of the most moving sequences depicts the destruction of the building across from Friedrich’s, including the ugly demise of what appears to be the world’s most stubborn and spirited rock. (Read full story…)