Ari Marcopoulos’s The Park (2017/18) is an uninterrupted 58-minute capture of the action on an unfenced basketball court adjacent to the Walt Whitman housing projects in Fort Greene Brooklyn, New York. With no physical barrier between athletes and spectators, and no evident delineation between the beginning or end of a game, players join and depart apparently at random, while park visitors wander past, and sometimes through, the activity on court. The Park reveals the game zone as a fundamental space of public social life, providing an anthropological cross-section of social codes. Marcopoulos brings a formalist’s eye to the court, transforming it into a stage upon which the unplanned direction of daily life plays out. The film is accompanied by an improvised soundtrack by musician Jason Moran, whose live-recorded performance spontaneously translates the visual rhythms of The Park’s unscripted choreography.
