"Blank City: The No Wave Years," a documentary about New York's DIY film scene, opens April 6 here.
Focusing on the mid-70s and 80s No Wave movement in New York, Celine Danhier’s new documentary paints a vivid portrait of the underground scene through interviews with its most notable fixtures: John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, and John Lurie among them. “New York was a very different and dangerous place to live then, like the Wild West,” says Danhier, whose film also references the East Village institutions that served as the genre’s unofficial headquarters, including the Mudd Club and CBGB. “It was run-down and almost bankrupt. But from that, this amazing do-it-yourself attitude grew.”
The clip above shows Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo and Mark Boone Junior in "The Way It Is" from 1985.
Via Nowness. Thanks to Shawn Chittle for the link.
3 comments:
"“New York was a very different and dangerous place to live then, like the Wild West.”
I'm sure that living on the frontier involved a unique energy at the time. Nonetheless, it would be more interesting if the former frontier dwellers, or at least their documentarians, insisted less on location and more on the creation, which they so wonderfully achieved. It would make their efforts more relevant today. And it would give some sense that the displacement and gentrification that ensued - thanks to Les Artistes - was not for the sake of a party.
I lived in the EV btw 1964-79 and was never mugged.Burglary was the big problem. The Love(left)ethic was in place although decreasingly so as the years advanced.I puke when some people characterize the EV during THAT period as nothing other than hell or the wild west. Yes,there was a crime problem but that's only part of the story.
Wherever in the world there's poverty there's street crime. So what else isn't new to uncover?
I always wanted to move to Ed Koch's and Sidney Lumet's New York. What a fucking disappointment to have been born too late and arrive here during Giuliani.
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