On a rooftop in Brooklyn

Screaming from the rooftops, well, one in particular, overlooking the Gowanus Canal this Friday, it's the first Rooftop Films program of 2004 in Brooklyn. The theme is home movies.

Home Movies
Friday, June 25th, 2004
8:30 - Live Music by Tom Warnick
9:00 - Movies remembered and mis-remembered

On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, in the Gowanus Section of Park Slope, Brooklyn.
In the event of rain the show will be indoors at the same location.
Dress warmly (it's cooler on the roof than in the street).

The folks behind Rooftop Films have done some serious thinking about the allure of the rooftops:

In the last scene of the film, our heroine races into the stairwell. The final conflict looms, and she has two options: up to the roof or down to the street. She chooses the roof, because the rooftop represents her last refuge, her only hope of escape. And because rooftops are inherently cinematic.

Following her to the roof, we might find a lush garden or tarpaper, a pool or a watertower, a skyscraper party with river views or the heroine alone, climbing through the hatchway of the shortest building around. But we find that life is different on the roof. In a flash we can see distance and detail—look at how the church steeples line up with the bridge towers. We discover an abandoned playground on top of a temple. We're out in the open, but hidden from the life beneath us, both on the ground and inside the buildings. We can hop from house to house for miles perhaps, spying on the world below. We become voyeurs, catburglars, superheroes, suicide cases, pursued victims of horror films. Up here, life becomes a movie.

The cinetrix remembers fondly her rooftop access in Brooklyn years ago. And, until Friday, she's staying across from a roofdeck where a guy is keeping a rooster and chickens. On the Bowery. I know, it sounds like something from a movie. [Thanks to ...something slant for the literal heads-up.]