Jörg Kalt 1998 in NYC | Foto: Marco Antoniazzi

In 1998 I went to New York with the cinematographer Eva Testor to shoot a documentary. We didn’t have a specific topic – we just knew that two weeks later we had to return to Vienna, to the Film Academy, and that at the end of the semester we had to submit our film.

We walked through New York, looking for a topic, searching for material. We stopped at a junction in southern Manhattan to eat sandwiches. While eating, we looked around. It was the Mulberry and Grand Street junction, where the two main roads in Little Italy and Chinatown meet. Tourists pushed their way down Mulberry Street and Chinese people filled Grand Street. At the corners of the junction: a former bank, a corner shop and a deli. And then, along each of the streets: a tobacco shop, Chinese restaurants, Italian restaurants, a barbershop and a church.

We spent the following ten days at this junction, filmed, did interviews, portrayed the shops, their owners and staff, and tried to find out what stories were going on behind the scenes at this junction.

Our first and most important contact was Therese, who worked in the tobacco shop at the Mulberry/Grand junction. She was of Irish descent and had no Italian blood at all and so she could give us an undiluted and unsentimental account of the events in the neighbourhood. She said that Little Italy would vanish while Chinatown would prevail. The Italians, who had given the neighbourhood its name and lived there for the last century, had prospered and moved to other boroughs like Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey. So the real Little Italies were to be found in those boroughs, while the most famous one – the original in Manhattan –was nothing but a Potemkin village, a mere tourist attraction. The few remaining Italian restaurants and cafes were already owned by the Chinese. Unlike the Italians, the Chinese still live in Chinatown. They live and work there. Whole families live in tiny flats with their elderly family members who don’t speak English and don’t need to speak English.

Jörg Kalt 1998 in NYC | Foto: Marco Antoniazzi

And so the Italians are losing ground; the Mafia doesn’t exist here anymore. The former immigrants are selling their estates and emigrating.

The face of this junction is changing and so is the face of the city.

We spoke to Italian Americans who have always been living in the neighbourhood and have watched Chinatown gradually grow – with a certain level of concern, to put it mildly. They realised that they were being pushed away and replaced by other immigrants.

At the corner, there is also a bank called “Stabile”. In the past, Italian immigrants arriving in New York would deposit their money in this bank – either to save it for a ticket back home or to bring their families to America. The whole time we were at that junction, “Stabile” was closed – no one entered and no one left the bank. But it seems that the bank owns some of the businesses in the neighbourhood: Therese told us that every month she slides an envelope containing the rent for the tobacco shop through the door of the bank.

Over the course of the two weeks, a portrait of a disappearing place began to materialise. A place that still exists on postcards or in Mafia movies, but is already hollowed –merely a shell of what it once was.

Our approach:

The idea determines the method used. Spontaneity is key to this film’s grammar. I didn’t do any research before I came across the junction. I interviewed everybody who seemed interesting to me – almost all of the interviews were unprepared, conducted at the person’s workplace. Every single day, we learned more about the junction – in other words, the film developed as our knowledge grew. We reversed the more journalistic approach: we found the solutions first and then we searched for the corresponding problems.

I myself am almost never in the picture (except for the scene, where I interview Robert De Niro’s barber while he gives me a shave), but I’m always present with my questions. That’s why I did the sound myself and that’s also why the microphone is permanently in the picture.

So absolute perfection was not our goal. But this doesn’t mean that our pictures are lousy or the sound unintelligible. It just means that the viewers will have the feeling that they are experiencing what they see and hear exactly as we are.

Jörg Kalt

It was a hot summer, the hotel Seventeen was steaming – there was no air conditioning, just windows which you could only open if you applied a fair bit of force because they usually got jammed. We had just arrived in NYC, checked in and arranged to meet at 5 p.m. in the lobby. Our rooms were next to each other, each hardly bigger than a shoebox. The furniture consisted of a bed, a wardrobe, a mirror and a chair. The toilet and bathroom were on the corridor.

I lay down on the narrow bed and sank about half a metre down into the mattress. The fatigue after the long journey was starting to get to me. I slipped off my shoes and they fell onto the cheap carpet with a muffled sound. Then I guess I fell asleep. Next thing I remember is Jörg’s eyes staring at me. It gave me quite a jump. He was holding a can of beer in front of my face. “Come”, he said and yanked open the window and climbed out onto the fire escape. I followed him, still bleary-eyed. We sat there and smoked and drank our Budweiser. A soft, cool breeze wafted its way through the street canyon up to the fire escape, making the summer heat and jetlag a bit more bearable.

The original plan had been to shoot a film about “homeless people” in the subways of New York, but Jörg had changed his mind. Everybody said it would be too dangerous. And I said, more importantly, it would be too dark down there.

So we sat there and didn’t know what to do and drank and smoked. We decided to take a walk in the neighbourhood and explore the area. After all, we were at the heart of Manhattan. We were staying in a hotel where Woody Allen had shot a film. Our story couldn’t be far away, we thought.

So, we started walking around and roamed the streets for a couple of days.

At first we didn’t have any particular reason for stopping and starting to shoot at the Mulberry and Grand Street junction. It just happened like that. Although it may be partly because Robert De Niro grew up in Little Italy and Jörg was such a big fan of his and the owner of the sandwich place on the corner was a De Niro clone and his sandwiches were just delicious.

Like two office clerks, we would go to our junction everyday at 9 a.m. sharp, have breakfast and lunch at the sandwich place and then without any particular plan we would explore these streets in Little Italy and Chinatown, the Shops Around the Corner.

Who were the people in the shops, on the street? What were their storird? How were they connected…