Blank City
Review by Mandy Stratavarias
Celine Danhier’s first feature, Blank City premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival recently, with a star studded cast in attendance. Spotted on the red carpet were Nick Zedd, James and Judy Chance, Steve Buscemi, James Nares and others. Premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last month, the documentary will soon be released world wide to larger audiences who likely will be surprised to learn of the hidden world it captures.
The movie focuses on the largely neglected and hitherto obscure yet rather influential underground film scenes of the late seventies to mid-eighties in New York City. Starting with the low budget 16mm films of Amos Poe, who began documenting punk bands at a dive called CBGBs ; (Heartbreakers, Patti Smith, Ramones) later producing narrative features like Unmade Beds and The Foreigner (with cameo appearances by Debbie Harry of Blondie) the movie goes on to explore the super-8 work of the “para-punk underground” and the “cinema of transgression” that broke new ground and all historical precedents in the early eighties.
Poe tells of having lost his job while his wife bore their first child and he first showed Blank Generation in between bands one winter night. Soon thereafter his wife “went crazy” and had to be committed while Poe found himself raising a child, broke and in debt.
Similar stories of poverty ridden struggle come from such later art world successes as James Nares, director of Rome 78 (backdated upon it’s premiere in ‘79) who recalls shooting on location in an expensive mansion he didn’t get permission to use, by visiting the place as a prospective buyer, unlocking a window and breaking in after dark with a cast and crew.
Many of the so-called “No Wave” filmmakers, overly influenced by French New Wave and Warholian single-take improvisations, bemoan their impoverished status at the time, though all are now conspicuously wealthy as befits those whose origins are from the privileged class. Falling into this category are the likes of Beth B. (Ida Applebroog’s daughter,) Maripol (producer of the long buried New York 81 feature,) Kiki Smith (rich Soho sculptor) and Jim Jarmusch (NYU graduate and Wim Wenders beneficiary who went on to direct John Lurie and Richard Edson in Stranger Than Paradise, launching a successful career as a mainstream director.)
Lurie, who directed Men In Orbit, an obscure super-8 film; acted in Beth & Scott B.’s Offenders, and Nare’s Rome 78 (co-starring Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Anya Phillips, Patti Astor and a Who’s Who of NY nightlife) went on to form the Lounge Lizards, a retro avant-garde jazz ensemble in the late seventies.
In Blank City, he denounces Jean Michele Basquiat’s attitude change upon his overnight fame which inculcated a money grubbing snobbery in the painter that many then emulated, contributing to the disintegration of the creative community that fueled the super-8 films.
Other filmmakers from the late seventies included in the feature are Bette Gordon, Sarah Driver, Lizzie Bordon, Charlie Ahearn (director of the first hip hop/graffitti doc, Wild Style,) Vivienne Dick and Michael Oblowitz (director of King Blank, starring Ron Vawter and Rosemary Hochschild, the extraordinarily gifted actress who also appeared in Scott B.’s Last Rights.)
Among the high points of Blank City are many clips showcasing long forgotten performances by genuinely stunning amateur actors like Adele Bertei (The Offenders); Bill Rice and James Russo (Vortex); Eric Bogosian (The Specialist); Lydia Lunch (The Right Side of My Brain); Steve Buscemi and Vincent Gallo (Permanent Vacation); Rockets Redglare (Police State); Joe Coleman (Where Evil Dwells) and the elegantly sexy Patti Astor (Underground USA) who went on to found the groundbreaking Fun Gallery in the early eighties as the world’s first graffiti gallery.
Celine Danhier, a law graduate of the Sorbonne, was first interested in documenting the more hard edged films of the Cinema of Transgression, a term invented by it’s chief practitioner, filmmaker Nick Zedd, who covered the movement’s birth in a self published magazine, The Underground Film Bulletin, showcasing super-8 work by fellow directors R. Kern, Manuel Delanda, Casandra Stark, Lung Leg, Tommy Turncoat, John Spencer, Richard Klemann, Kembra Pfahler, Tessa Hughes Freeland and others from 1984 to 1990. Since no magazine, newspaper or reporter would talk about these films and no theatres would allow them to be seen, it became necessary for Zedd and others to create their own media. Tommy Turncoat similarly produced a zine called Redrum that collected transgressive art and writing by filmmakers, actors and artists like Zedd, Wojnerowicz, Lung Leg, Stark and others.
Zedd, having directed a super-8 feature in 1979 called They Eat Scum, was ruthlessly dedicated to providing a forum for more raw, cutting edge movies and less concerned with emulating a cinematic style acclimatized through repeated viewings of Breathless and other French artifacts. The Cinema of Transgression was home-grown, down and dirty with a New York edge that epitomized authenticity. In contrast to the films of Eric Mitchell, Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe, there were no historical parallels to the films of the Cinema of Transgression, which inspired an institutional revulsion and media rejection unlike anything before them.
Compared to the cinema of transgression filmmakers, the late seventies super-8 directors working in New York come across as somewhat mannered, academic and well behaved. Their chief source of interest is in their close proximity to the punk and no wave anti-music explosions that produced such varied and exciting bands as the Voidoids, Teenage Jesus, the Contortions, DNA and others. Band members appearing in their films supplied a steady pool of untrained talent, as did filmmakers experimenting as musicians in bands.
The Cinema of Transgression was less referential, not depending on a discredited notion of a star system coming out of a music scene. That formula appears to have died with the seventies, along with the notion that musicians are any longer cultural avatars, having been thoroughly co-opted into a reactionary entertainment business based on self congratulatory spectacles like the Video Music Awards, Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and other distractions.
To filmmakers like Zedd, Kern and Delanda, no institutions were trustworthy; money was secondary to creative expression and cultural conditioning would be jettisoned in crudely executed jolts of shock value designed to piss off the middle class gatekeepers of the art world. A raw, essential honesty emerged from this brand of filmmaking, using humor, pornography, violence and excess in the service of revolutionary consciousness.
In an effort to hedge her bets and produce a more commercial product, Danhier appears to have acceded to her producers and expanded Blank City to include the lengthy prologue focusing on the more readily famous musical acts and movies that emerged from an earlier milieu when a complete media clampdown had not yet occurred; before the abrupt break with the past that the cinema of transgression represents. This is a typical, recurring flaw of many documentarians, being themselves parasites of belated awareness, searching for something authentic to latch onto in order to fill a hole in their lives. Serving their historical function as cultural excavators, these filmmakers frequently produce career launching first features in such a manner. Rather than begrudge their useful job as media archeologists for a society befuddled by grand simulations, bad reality TV and corporate spectacles designed to hide the truth, we should welcome new filmmakers like Danhier whose Blank City captures a time and place lost to us.
The exhilarating rediscovery of the films of the cinema of transgression, so long excluded from our culture’s agenda can now be a source of celebration.
Movies like Zedd’s Police State and War is Menstrual Envy; Kern’s Manhattan Love Suicides and You Killed Me First; DeLanda’s Harmful or Fatal if Swallowed and Turncoat’s Where Evil Dwells still make us laugh and stimulate thought. Their cultural excavation may yet spread new ideas to a wider audience and erode the institutional clampdown that has so impoverished our view of the world in gatekeeper galleries, screening rooms and museums. Then again, perhaps the cinema of transgression will always be the province of the outcasts, forever shunned by dominant culture, yet always there to be discovered if you look hard enough.