The Terminal Bar is a photographic documentary about one of New York’s roughest, toughest and most notorious bar directed by Stefan Nadelman using a collection of Sheldon Nadelmans black and white photographs. These photographs were taken over a period of 10 years, from 1972 to 1982.

The photographs show personal portraits of the different people who entered the Terminal Bar and the bar itself; these images have been combined with newspaper clippings, upbeat music and narrative throughout to create a realistic and scenic atmosphere of the bar. When Sheldon Nadelman is describing a person within a photos, they get enlarged and zoomed into, this creates motion within the photographs and portrays the aspect of Terminal Bar being a film in today’s era. The movement within the still images and the transition between the images and newspaper articles really flow together.

The music in the background plays to compromise the specific memory he has of that person. I really liked the use of background bar noise throughout the film, it had a really good effect on the images and set the scene of the bar. Towards the middle of the film there was a break in narrative and stories and it just focused on the portraits that Sheldon Nadelman had taken, this showed all the portraits he had collected over the 10 years and were displayed against an upbeat song.

The ending of the film shows the modern-day reality of what the Terminal Bar was to become and how even in the present day, Stefan Nadelman says nothing has really changed. If I were going to create a document I’d defiantly look into trying out this style of photographic media.

http://www.touristpictures.com/SHORT-FILMS.html