As you might know, the documentary provides an oral history of the No Wave Cinema and Cinema of Transgression movements in the Lower East Side in the late 1970s into the mid-1980s via interviews with Jim Jarmusch, Nick Zedd, John Waters, Deborah Harry, Fab 5 Freddy, Richard Kern, among many others.
And the film is playing this evening for free. Seating at 6; screening starts at 6:15. All this is followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Bette Gordon and James Nares.
"Blank City" director Céline Danhier answered some questions for me back in April when the film played at the IFC Center.
Bonus excerpt:
Do you think a creative movement such as No Wave Cinema is possible again in the East Village?
Of course the East Village is a very different place now and there is a lot more money here, but still I would have to say yes. I think art movements are very cyclical and I do think that a lot of that same raw energy and creative frequency is here. It is still what brought me to New York in the first place. Perhaps now that same youthful creative explosion is happening more in Brooklyn than the East Village, but the City is always in flux. As Jim Jarmusch notes in "Blank City," New York was initially a trading post and then a city grew around it and it is always constantly changing. There are new people coming in and out of the city and the East Village daily from all over the world and I think you can’t help but find inspiration from that sort of environment. All the ingredients are there for something new to happen in the future.
Read the whole interview here.
This was an excellent documentary, caught it at IFC earlier this year.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone else find ironic that artists like the ones featured in the documentary can no longer afford to live and work in the city because of things like million dollar think tanks?
just look at soho
ReplyDeleteremember it before it was soho?