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subscribe to style file blog via RSSDown And Dirty With Filmmaker Céline Danhier
May 1, 2009 2:15 pm
It goes without saying that New York is a great town for movies. And thought it may count as small comfort in these dicey times, New York is often at its greatest, movie-wise, when the city in general is at its worst. Consider the seventies, era of “The Bronx is burning” and “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” That was the decade that gave us Scorsese, and Taxi Driver, and Coppola’s first two Godfather flicks, and Klute and The French Connection and “Network,” and Woody Allen’s two masterpieces Manhattan and Annie Hall. (An incomplete list, but it will have to do.) One of the more consequential cinematic developments of those good ol’ bad days, meanwhile, came as a direct result of the fact that New York City was falling apart at the seams. Artists, musicians, outcasts, and anarchists squatted in apartments on the crumbling blocks of the Lower East Side, picked up a hot Super-8 camera or two, and invented American independent filmmaking. Amos Poe, Susan Seidelman, and Jim Jarmusch are a few of the better-recognized names to come out of that scene, which gets a proper history in Blank City. Directed by first-time filmmaker Céline Danhier, the documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week and has its final screening this evening in the East Village. Here, Danhier talks to Style.com about her down-and-dirty picture.
This is kind of a strange question to lead off with but…you’re French?
Well, yes, I guess you can tell from the accent. I moved to the city from Paris about three years ago.
I’m surprised that you’re not a native New Yorker—the film seems like the work of someone really steeped in the city’s lore. How did you get exposed to the subject matter?
The first time I saw these movies was at a retrospective of No Wave films at the Centre Pompidou—I went to see Rome 78, by James Nares. Basically, a lot of films from that time are not very famous, except for maybe, you know, Jim Jarmusch, and Wild Style, but overall they are quite obscure. Anyway, I was watching Rome 78, and I see Lydia Lunch in the film, and James Chance, and I was like, oh, it’s funny—these people that I knew from music, they were acting. You had at that time a lot of collaboration, between artists and musicians and filmmakers—that was really the peak. I was curious about that. And the style of filmmaking, too, it was very raw, brutal. So when I came to New York the first time, I would rent a lot of movies from Kim’s Video—Amos Poe movies, Eric Mitchell—and I began to think I should do a documentary about these two movements that happened at that time, the No Wave and the Cinema of Transgression.
Your documentary sets this out, but for the layman, what’s the difference between No Wave and the Cinema of Transgression?
Cinema of Transgression came after—the movies are shorter, and they were more violent and more sexual. They wanted to push the boundaries of what could be shown in a film. No Wave wanted to break the rules, in terms of how you could make a film, but Cinema of Transgression wanted to break the rules of No Wave.
My take on that—to be honest—is that the Cinema of Transgression was a minor movement and No Wave was a major one. I mean, it’s out of No Wave that you get all the consequences, like Desperately Seeking Susan coming along and exposing this whole scene to the mainstream, or Jim Jarmusch going to Cannes, or Wild Style becoming this platform for the breakthrough of hip-hop culture. And beyond that, the rise of Miramax and Sundance and independent American filmmaking in general…This isn’t a criticism, but I was curious to know your reasons for not chasing that end of the story.
I was interested in showing what was happening in New York City at that time. I think people already know about Jim Jarmusch and Desperately Seeking Susan. I want people to see the origin. And more than that, I just want to promote these movies, especially the ones that aren’t so well known. For example, I really love the films by Scott and Beth B—they’re so interesting, visually, and when I watched them the first time I was sometimes reminded of David Lynch. And Michael Oblowitz’s King Blank—that one’s great, a really crazy story. Even Nick Zedd, too—he’s the guy who started the Cinema of Transgression, and his films can be hard to watch for some people, but they are really quite funny.
One the themes running through Blank City is the relationship of these movements to the poverty of New York City at the time. Do you think that kind of work is possible now?
It’s true, yes—the city was in a really bad place, and the Lower East Side especially, it was poor and it was dangerous. But that also meant that it was cheap, and people could afford to live here without really working, and they could make art without worrying about whether or not it would sell. The people I interviewed, they would often talk about it being a pure moment, that way, because you could take your camera and just say, OK, let’s see if this works. If it did, great, if not, that was OK, too. Obviously, it’s more of a struggle, financially, to be an artist in New York now. But I do think it’s possible to work here, in a really independent way, because that’s what I did. I moved here from France, I had no money, no connections, really, and no filmmaking skills, per se. I had a full-time job the whole time, but other than that, I made this movie the same way the No Wave filmmakers made theirs—you know, with that attitude of, OK, you’ve got the camera, now go.
tags: Celine Dahnier
love what she is whereing…is hot…
By ilovevince on 05/4/09 at 10:27 amThe film still is of Patti Astor in Eric Mitchell’s Underground USA (1980), a clip of which is used in Blank City. Thank you.
By squaringoff on 10/4/09 at 10:12 pm