Cast

Amos Poe, Deborah Harry, Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Glenn O'Brien, Ann Magnuson, Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Steve Buscemi, Michael Oblowitz, Thurston Moore, Manuel Delanda, Beth B., Scott B, Susan Seidelman, Richard Kern

Film description

Blank City is the untold story of 1970s/1980s New York punk cinema, which stormed out Lower East Side squats popping with cheap booze and drug-fueled raw energy. No Wave Cinema and the Transgression Movement produced powerful provocative films that riffed on French new wave, films by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith or John Waters. Filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe, Beth B, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern or Casandra Stark used microscopic budgets to make long, short, color, black and white portraits of urban alienation. The films are enigmatic, dark, humorous, sex-and-violence manifestos with underground sensitivity. Shocking for their graphic obscenity and political intransigence, No Wave and Transgression Movement films were kept out of cinemas, protested, and sometimes confiscated.

Celine Danhier’s film shows a snapshot of New York history through a skillful mix of interviews with the movements’ luminaries and archival footage. The punk rock screaming from and off the screen provides Blank City’s visceral energy, with cuts by Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The Bush Tetras, and Sonic Youth.

Ewa Szabłowska