Coming to theatres this Wednesday, April 6: BLANK CITY
Celine Danhier’s debut film had a special work-in-progress screening at Tribeca in 2009 before its official world premiere at Berlin in 2010. It went on to play more than twenty festivals, including Hot Docs, Edinburgh, Melbourne, AFI, and the Viennale.
The film explores New York City’s underground “No Wave Cinema” and “Cinema of Transgression” of the 1970s-80s, focused largely in the East Village – then an often dangerous, drug-ridden neighborhood popular with artists due to low rents. Danhier showcases the largely still-unseen films of the period, which were characterized by virtually zero budgets and a decidedly non-traditional DIY aesthetic and production model, and interviews a dizzying number of key figures from the period, including directors Jim Jarmusch, Susan Seidelman, Amos Poe, Beth B, and Nick Zedd, with additional commentary from notables like Deborah Harry, Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore, Steve Buscemi, Richard Kern, and John Waters. While BLANK CITY might oversimplify the diversity of the different filmmakers in an attempt to more neatly fit them into a consideration of the overall movement, it still has value in providing present day audiences with access to a whole generation of filmmaking that never received much attention upon its scrappy self-release. It serves as a time capsule of sorts, especially in showing what toll NYC’s economic bankruptcy had on the East Village and how artists responded to it, turning adversity into a source of inspiration through self-reliance.
what (not) to doc 