The mall has been the setting of many films, most famously Dawn of the Dead. Outside of George A. Romero or Mallrats, however, the consumer-crazed structure is often seen in montage in ’80s or ’90s shopping sprees. The mall was a place to kill time, rebel, or attempt to buy happiness. Vanina made a list of movies with prominent mall scenes and tagged it as part of her “nostalgia series” of lists. The mall as a movie setting is a relic. It’s nostalgia.
Secret Mall Apartment details a prolific community DIY artist who, after the closing of an underground space in Providence, Rhode Island, decided to build studio space inside the mall itself for young artists to work and live (if needed). The group’s leader, Michael Townsend, utilized electric tape for his art and, thus his art is meant to be temporary. It can be pulled down any moment. But through his need to video his steps to show others how to move through the mall undetected—this footage, unknowingly, becomes his artwork that will last. Using home video footage from small camera devices, the intimate first-hand coverage shows how Townsend’s crew of creatives navigated and moved throughout the mall into an area without security cameras, where they could build a space within a space.
Jeremy Workman’s documentary works like a heist movie, where the “heist” is figuring out how to live rent-free in a space that was built to take your money at every turn. Elliot calls it, “a profoundly inspiring documentary about creating art in defiance of gentrification, capitalism, and getting older.” Jamm says it’s “so insane that this whole process was all captured and it’s really a treat to see the archival footage of them moving into the room and hanging out together. Genuinely some of the most punk shit ever. True artistic expression has no rules, gentrification is inhumane, and sometimes you need to break into your local mall and build a secret apartment as retaliation.”
Mall nostalgia isn’t a fondness for the stores themselves, but the time that was spent with others. And ultimately, that’s what shines through beyond the thesis in Secret Mall Apartment. It chronicles a very specific time in the American consumer and cultural landscape via an art collective. And the ringleader, who transcended the temporary status of a movement and turned it into a life’s work. BF
