Blank City

Now mostly in their fifties and sixties, the film-makers celebrated in Céline Danhier’s documentary “Blank City”, opening tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York, were at one time the epitome of youthful rebellion. Although I had at most only a glancing familiarity with their work, I found myself developing a real sympathy for some people whose main goal in life apparently was to aggravate other people in the same fashion as punk rock bands, the inspiration for the “no wave” film movement.

Indeed, the primary impetus for this new film movement was to capture live performances of bands such as Television, Talking Heads and the Ramones that were appearing at venues such as CBGB’s. Lydia Lunch, a prime mover in both the music and film scene downtown at the time, describes how she recruited a drummer for one of her bands. She says that when the fellow demurred, saying that he had no experience whatsoever as a drummer, she replied that was exactly what she was looking for.

The “no wave” movies were shot almost exclusively on Super-8 cameras that predated the camcorder revolution. These hand-held cameras, about the size of a camcorder, were fairly inexpensive and not terribly hard to learn how to use. People like Lydia Lunch were not bothered that the movies made with them had a crude appearance. As should be obvious, that was the visual counterpart of the music they were making. All in all, the punk scene was a reaction to the bloated and commercial direction rock-and-roll had taken, with overproduced disco albums especially targeted. The movies that followed in punk’s footsteps had the same esthetic, a nose-thumbing rebuke of Hollywood. As is stated throughout the movie, the interviewees described their work as influenced by Dadaism and surrealism, the two artistic trends that had similar ambitions in the 1920s and 30s, namely to repudiate the status quo.

Most of the people involved with this movement are faded memories today. Along with Lydia Lunch, we hear from Scott and Beth B. who were at the time quite prominent as “no wave” film making pioneers. Other key participants were Lizzie Borden, James Nares, Eric Mitchell, and Michael Oblowitz. Some others managed to use their notoriety as experimental directors (and even some actors like Steve Buscemi) to launch careers in independent film. Jim Jarmusch is probably the best known. His “Stranger than Paradise”, an exercise in dead-pan humor reminiscent of the Finnish genius Aki Kaurismäki, is available from Netflix and is a pretty good introduction to the genre’s commercial offspring. Susan Seidelman made a rather exploitative feature film on the downtown scene called “Desperately Seeking Susan” that starred Madonna. I think you will find that it is much more dated than Jarmusch’s work.

Most interesting for me is the political stance taken by a number of the “no wave” film-makers that despite being expressed in rather obscure forms was aimed at the Reagan administration and the sense that American capitalism was a corrupt and decadent system. I especially appreciated the sensibility expressed by Nick Zedd and other members of the “Cinema of Transgression” school that was denounced by the Wall Street Journal. They put together a manifesto that incorporates a blast at “film theory” that I fully embrace, especially after enduring a month or so of it in a documentary film class at Columbia University:

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possessed the vision to see through this charade. We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over.

Legitimizing every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centers and geriatric cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank – such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straightjackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man. We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition. Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men.

We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema. We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression – to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.

BRAVO!!!