NJ Film Festival will offer 50th anniversary screening of ‘Three Days on Big City Waters’

Michael Rockland, left, and Charles Woolfolk in “Three Days on Big City Waters.”

The New Jersey Film Festival at Rutgers University in New Brunswick usually shows only new or recently released films. But it is making an exception for 1974’s “Three Days on Big City Waters,” which it will present, in a 50th anniversary screening, Oct. 6 at 5 p.m. at Rutgers’ Voorhees Hall, with Rutgers’ American Studies Department co-sponsoring. There will be no admission charge.

The 48-minute film, originally released by New Jersey Public Broadcasting in 1974, stars Michael Rockland (then a Rutgers professor) and Charles Woolfolk (then a Rutgers dean) as themselves; it re-creates a canoe trip they took on Labor Day Weekend of the previous year, from Princeton to Manhattan.

Clark Santee, who went on to have a long career in film and television, produces and directs, and Michael Cooney provides a charming soundtrack of folk and bluegrass music.

It is a very low-budget film, which seems appropriate for its subject matter: Rockland and Woolfolk don’t seem to have done much preparation or planning for their trip. They just kind of wing it. This is fine for Rockland, but not as great for the more prone-to-worry Woolfolk. “He is the eternal optimist … It’s the one characteristic in Michael that I simultaneously admire and cannot stand,” says Woolfolk, who serves as the film’s narrator.

The Statue of Liberty, as seen in “Three Days on Big City Waters.”

Their biggest problem is the weather: Strong winds make the rowing very difficult at times. But they get some essential help, at one point, from a friendly motorboat owner who agrees to tow them, and their journey is ultimately a successful one.

Their biggest revelation has to do with the environmentally perilous state of Arthur Kill (the strait between New Jersey and Staten Island).

“Everywhere we looked, there was garbage,” says Woolfolk. “It probably came from all over New York, Brooklyn, Queens — wherever. And they were dumping it here. Truckload after truckload, as if they were mining the garbage somewhere and stockpiling it on Staten Island. Someday, these dumps will say a lot to archaeologists about our civilization.”

Another fascinating part of the movie comes when they sneak onto Ellis Island, which had been an immigration center for many years, but was, in 1973, closed to the general public, with its grand buildings empty and deteriorating.

“Eerie hallways led to rooms where time seemed to have stopped long ago,” says Woolfolk. “Papers were still on the desks. You could almost hear the foreign voices and the cries of children.”

Michael Rockland, now a Rutgers professor emeritus, will participate in a question-and-answer session following the New Jersey Film Festival screening. Visit njfilmfest.com.