News

When discussing DC Comics movies, most fans immediately think of the big-screen adventures of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the like. But DC has put more into the world than just superhero properties, and one forgotten imprint in particular produced two critically-acclaimed feature films that would go on to be nominated for several Academy Awards.

Started in 1995, Paradox Press was a continuation of the earlier Piranha Press, an attempt by DC to reach an alternative audience away from the capes-and-tights crowd. Similar to DC’s mature readers line Vertigo, Paradox published comics meant to appeal to a more adult audience with different sensibilities.

Before they were star-studded Oscar nominees, both Road to Perdition and A History of Violence were published during Paradox Press’ relatively brief lifespan. Telling grounded crime stories with nary a Batmobile nor magic lasso in sight, the two works show an entirely different side of DC Comics.

Exclusive: Independent Artist Group’s Physical Production department has added two agents, bringing in veteran Allison Irvin from Zero Gravity Management and promoting Natalia González, who we’re told has been a vital contributor to the department for many years. Irvin will be based in Iag’s New York office, with González working out of Los Angeles.

“We are proud to continue to identify, hire and nurture diverse voices within the Iag Physical Production department,” said Iag’s Head of Physical Production, Julian Savodivker, “and in Allison and Natalia we have two excellent new additions that will allow us to continue to grow our business domestically and internationally across all production disciplines as well as expand into the world of Music Composers and Supervisors which is very exciting for us.”

Working in film and television for nearly 15 years, Irvin has now spent a decade representing Physical Production clients. During her two years at Zero Gravity,...

Robert Gordon, a rockabilly devotee and singer whose band the Tuff Darts was a staple of New York City’s Cbgb and Max’s Kansas City punk scene of the 1970s, died today. He was 75.

His death was announced by his record label Cleopatra Records on Facebook. “Cleopatra Records would like to offer our deepest condolences to his family and friends,” the statement reads. “We liked working with Robert and will miss his powerful baritone vocal as well as his focused dedication to his music.”

Related Story Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2022: Photo Gallery Related Story Noel Duggan Dies: Founding Member of Irish Folk Group Clannad Was 73 Related Story Nolan Neal Dies: 'America's Got Talent' & 'The Voice' Singer Was 41 – Update

A cause of death was not disclosed, but a GoFundMe page set up by his family says Gordon had been battling an aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia.

Let Walter Hill take you back to the Old West and diplomacy, 1897-style, where differences are figured out with card games and bullwhips, and folks have itching powder all over their trigger fingers. Shooting someone dead is presented as a go-to for how to resolve an argument in this world. References to guns are made with such regularity that it becomes unclear whether this is a straight Western or a pastiche. Dialogue tends to unfold like this. Sneering goon: “Who are you?” Witty good guy, “I’m the fella with the gun!”

That’s “Dead for a Dollar” for ya. One of the main fellas with a gun is famed bounty hunter Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) who has been hired by the well-to-do Martin Kidd (Hamish Linklater) to find his teacher wife Rachel (Rachel Brosnahan) after she disappears with her Black student Elijah (Brandon Scott). The way that Martin tells it,...

Illustration by Jeff CashvanMovie-lovers!Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a title that we think embodies NYC movie going, and present the venue at which it premiered…In November of 2013, we screened Amos Poe’s 1985 neon-blinding neo-noir Alphabet City, with Mr. Poe in attendance. Now, in honor of the recent Blu-ray re-release, distributed by Fun City Editions, we present a new conversation with the No Wave maverick about his early years living and working in New York City. And… Fun City Editions invites Amos back to Nitehawk on November 3 to project Alphabet City on 35mm, with a Q&a following the film guest moderated by The Deuce’s Joe Berger.

Amos Poe had already directed one homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (his 1976 debut feature Unmade Beds) when he began production on the 1984 thriller Alphabet City, but the latter film is the one that really earns the comparisons it invites to Godard and the French New Wave as a whole. A member of the East Village “No Wave” movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s that also included Abel Ferrara, Bette Gordon, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, Poe began his career with the seminal punk rock documentary The Blank Generation, and Alphabet City is a singular mash-up of […]

The post Alphabet City, I Start Counting! and Captain Newman, M.D.: Jim Hemphill's Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Amos Poe had already directed one homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (his 1976 debut feature Unmade Beds) when he began production on the 1984 thriller Alphabet City, but the latter film is the one that really earns the comparisons it invites to Godard and the French New Wave as a whole. A member of the East Village “No Wave” movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s that also included Abel Ferrara, Bette Gordon, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, Poe began his career with the seminal punk rock documentary The Blank Generation, and Alphabet City is a singular mash-up of […]

The post Alphabet City, I Start Counting! and Captain Newman, M.D.: Jim Hemphill's Home Video Recommendations first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The appealingly atmospheric crime thriller Alphabet City (1984) debuts on Blu-ray this fall courtesy of Fun City Editions. Directed by Amos Poe, with a script by Poe, Gregory K. Heller (additional dialogue is credited to Robert Seidman), Alphabet City belongs in the company of After Hours and Into The Night (both 1985) as one of the ultimate ’80s nightmare nocturnes, and it is downright, well, criminal that Alphabet City is not better remembered today. Hopefully this Blu-ray will work towards amending that.

Alphabet City

Blu-ray

Fun City Editions

1984 / Color / 1.85:1 widescreen / 85 min. / Street Date September 29, 2020 / available through Vinegar Syndrome / 24.99

Starring: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Raymond Serra.

Cinematography: Oliver Wood

Film Editor: Grahame Weinbren

Composer: Nile Rodgers

Written by Amos Poe, Gregory K. Heller, Robert Siedman (additional dialogue).

Produced by Andrew Braunsberg

Directed by Amos Poe

As things kick off, our temperamental hero Johnny, a street hustler for the mob,...

Bettina Gilois, an award-winning screenwriter and author, has died in her sleep at age 58, according to a friend. She had an advanced form of cancer and passed just days before her July 9 birthday.

Gilois was having what was described by a friend as “a career year” when she passed, with several projects in development at various networks.

Gilois first began working as an assistant to Slava Tsukerman, the director of Liquid Sky, in her native Berlin. She also worked at Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York on the television series Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.

She subsequently joined Keith Barish and Arnold Kopelson Productions as a development executive, which led to producing credits on Fire Birds, as well as Triple Bogie on a Par Five Hole with Amos Poe.

She began her writing career working with Joel Silver Productions, and in the last twenty five years has written projects for further notable producers,...

Celine Danhier with Joel Coen and Ethan Coen at the table behind us at The Odeon on the evolution of Blank City: "James Nares said 'Let me call Jim Jarmusch.' It was really like that. And then at the same time I had the music scenes and I interviewed Pat Place." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Celine Danhier's all-hands-on-deck Blank City, edited to perfection by Vanessa Roworth, enters the world of the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression. We see and hear about the work of Bette Gordon, Casandra Stark Mele, Charlie Ahearn, Michael Oblowitz, Nick Zedd, Sara Driver, Susan Seidelman, Maripol, Patti Astor, Eric Mitchell, Beth B, Vivienne Dick, Vincent Gallo, John Lurie, Steve Buscemi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lizzie Borden, Amos Poe, John Waters, James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, Anders Grafstrom, Richard Kern, Ann Magnuson, James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Becky Johnston, Adele Bertei, Scott B, Tommy Turner, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Kemra Pfahler,...

If it's not clear from my shows over the past 16 or 17 years, I like movies. I love movies.

On Parts Unknown, we reference films frequently — and whenever possible, invite filmmakers I admire to talk about their work and the places that inform it. I've been lucky enough over the years to have had a number of great artists on camera: Francis Ford Coppola (for Puglia and Basilicata), Darren Aronofsky (Madagascar, Bhutan), the late, great Vilmos Zsigmond (Hungary) and Abel Ferrara (Rome). In an upcoming episode, we sit down with Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe.

I have ...

She Had Her Gun All Ready By Vivienne Dick (1978).

This is the second film by Vivienne Dick and the first one that included a plot and actresses playing roles. Her first film was Guerillere Talks (1978), a collection of filmed portraits of female punk musicians, including Lydia Lunch and Pat Place, both of whom star in She Had Her Gun All Ready.

The film was shot on Super 8mm and screened at the New Cinema, a short-lived storefront theater on St. Mark’s Place in New York City’s Lower East Side. The film is considered part of the “No Wave” film movement that included Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Amos Poe and Beth and Scott B. “No Wave” was the cinematic extension of NYC’s downtown punk music scene.

Although the official title appears to be She Had Her Gun All Ready, the title in the actual film — handwritten in a...

Take any standard Hollywood action thriller and strip out all convoluted backstories, remove all romantic subplots, shoot down any unnecessary exposition, eviscerate all special effects — CGI and practical — and film the whole thing with Super 8 and camcorders. Do all that and you’ve got yourself another Bob Moricz masterpiece.

In Krimi, a mysterious stranger rolls back into town searching for a missing family member and becomes embroiled in the seedy criminal underground that he’s tried so hard to escape. That’s the kind of set-up that’s fueled a zillion movie plots. Here, though, writer/director/editor Moricz has boiled that plot completely down to its absolute essentials and filmed the whole thing in his trademark surrealist lo-fi style that the end product is a trip into a nightmarish netherzone that bears absolutely no resemblance to reality.

Moricz himself stars as that mysterious stranger — the awesomely named Vic Slezak...

Rural Russian film takes top prize at Poland’s New Horizons International Film Festival.

Russian director Alexander Fedorchenko’s Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari received the Grand Prix and a €20,000 ($27,000) cash prize at the 13th New Horizons International Film Festival (July 18-28) in Wroclaw.

The decision by the International jury, headed by Hungary’s Bela Tarr and including Polish film-maker Joanna Kos-Krauze and Berlinale Forum director Christoph Terhechte, was announced ahead of the Polish premiere of Malgorzata Szumowska’s In The Name Of on Saturday evening.

Fedorchenko’s film had its world premiere at last year’s Rome Film Festival.

Review: Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari

In June, it won three awards - best script, best cinematography and the Prize of the Russian Guild of Film Scholars and Film Critics - at the Kinotavr “Open Russian” Film Festival in Sochi.

The $2m production by Fedorchenko’s 29 February Film Company explores the myths of the Russian...

The T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, has announced the jurors in its four competitions.

The main international competition jury is comprised of directors Béla Tarr [pictured], Dominga Sotomayor, Edgar Pera and Joanna Kos-Krauze as well as Christoph Terhechte of the Berlinale Forum.

The Fipresci jury will include journalists Neil Young (UK), István Szathmáry (Hungary) and Błażej Hrapkowicz (Poland).

The Films On Art International Competition jury includes filmmakers Ben Russel, Amos Poe and Karol Radziszewski with MoMA’s Sally Berger and the Diagonale’s Barbara Pichler.

The Polish Shorts Competition jury includes festival programmers Laurence Reymond (Quinzaine des Realisateurs) and Jukka-Pekka Laakso (Tampere) and filmmaker Fijona Jonuzi.

The European Shorts Competition jury is comprised of Polish professionals Ana Brzezinska, Norman Leto and critic Jakub Majmurek.

The 13th festival runs July 18-28.

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner to open T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival; competition titles announced.Scroll down for competition titles

Poland’s T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival (July 18-28) is to open with this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Blue is the Warmest Colour (La vie d’Adèle - Chapitre 1 & 2) by Abdellatif Kechiche.

The closing film will be the Polish premiere of Malgoska Szumowska’s Berlinale competition title and Teddy Award winner In the Name of.

Festival organizers also announced the films in competition at this year’s event.

The New Horizons International Competition consists of 12 Polish premieres including Rotterdam competition title Noche by Leonardo Brzezicki, Locarno Fipresci award winner Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, as well as this year’s Cannes’ Un Certain Regard title Stranger by the Lake by Alain Guiraudie.

The Jury for this competition will be announced next week.

The Films in...

Bradley Rubenstein: You are known primarily for your film work, but this show, Robots, is paintings. Is painting a new venture for you, like an extension of filmmaking, or something new?

Amos Poe: I am a filmmaker and have been making various art objects for years; the similarity is that they both take over my conscious and subconscious, and I'm compelled to get them out. Painting is a new discovery, or at least the pleasures of it are new. A new love. I started having dreams of robots in May of 2012, and the first painting came about a week later. I've been painting these robots since then, and the dreams still come regularly. I think everyone should have a robot in her or his life.

Br: You are a seminal New York filmmaker, so it almost seems beside the point where you are from, or studied, or whatnot...

Here's the latest Austin film news.

Take a trip back in time with the screening of Amos Poe's film Unmade Beds at 7 pm on Wednesday in the Austin Film Society Screening Room. It's 1976, New York City, and "Rico," a photographer, is searching for reality down the barrel of his camera lens to fulfill his innermost fantasies in this No Wave classic, starring Debbie "Blondie" Harry. The Austin documentary Trash Dance, which premiered at SXSW 2012 (Mike's review), is up for a Cinema Eye audience award ... and you can vote for it online right now. The film is about choreographer Allison Orr's project to create a "dance" performance based around Austin Department of Solid Waste staff and vehicles. The results will be announced at Cinema Eye's awards ceremony on January 9.The 2013 Sundance Film Festival has added a few more features to its lineup ... including El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez's first...

The anxiously anticipated prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens today, and moviegoers have a choice of watching in standard 24 frames per second (fps) or 48fps and 3D at a few select theaters in Austin. The Hobbit is the first major studio release shot in 48fps. Supporters claim that the new technology adds sharpness and realism to the film, but I found the projection distracting. Characters with makeup and prosthetics are quite obvious and the movement appears jerky at time. I look forward to seeing the movie again soon at 24fps so I can focus on the epic story itself.

Austin Film Society Essential Cinema presents the 1962 film Only Two Can Play on Tuesday, December 18, 7 pm at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Peter Sellers plays a henpecked Welsh librarian who is propositioned by the wife of a local councillor. I encourage fellow Sellers fans...

By the end of “A Walk in the Park” ’s 96 minutes, you will know a lot about Brian Fass. You will know of his various ailments, his depression, his relationship with his mother, the medication he is on, the mountain he nearly climbed, his electroshock therapy and the titular walk in the park that marked some sort of turning point in his life. What you will not know, however, is why on God’s green earth you should care. “A Walk in the Park,” from New York indie director Amos Poe premiered today In Competition at the Xxi sidebar of the Rome Film Festival, which is a section dedicated to films of all lengths that “reflect the continuous reinvention of cinema in the contemporary audiovisual landscape.” Sad to report, this film reinvents the documentary portrait tradition into a thoroughly confounding and tiresome experience. A self-consciously meta film that purports from...

Rome – The International Rome Film Festival announced the full lineup for its CinemaXXI sidebar Tuesday, highlighted by A Walk in the Park from “No Wave” cult director Amos Poe, Michael Wahrmann’s Avanti Popolo, Peter Greenway’s Goltzius and the Pelican Company and Steekspel (Tricked) from Paul Verhoeven. Newly installed artistic director Marco Mueller also announced that actor and director James Franco, who is connected to two films in the CinemaXXI lineup, will receive a special prize in Rome. And for the first time, organizers screened in public the short trailer that will precede the screenings of all the films in

read more...

While always a city bursting with creative and artistic talent, there was probably no time more fertile in New York City than than '70s and '80s. Avant-garde art, hip hop, punk, no-wave, disco and more all clashed and mingled, leaving a lasting impression on pop culture, politics and the city itself. Among that noise and ruckus, independent filmmakers were also making a big wave, capturing New York's vibrancy in stories that inspired a new generation of directors. And that time has been captured in the documentary "Blank City."

Directed by Celine Danhier, the film explores the artists of the "No Wave Cinema" and "Cinema of Transgression" movements who shattered existing notions of Diy and underground art, and paved the way for today's independent film scene. Through interviews with Steve Buscemi, Debbie Harry, Jim Jarmusch, Fab 5 Freddy and John Waters and many more, the film presents a revealing...

You Are Not I

"Showcasing a free-form approach to narrative that you'll wish wasn't all but extinct in American independent cinema," writes Benjamin Mercer in the L, "Sara Driver's long-unavailable (and too small) body of work constitutes a minor revelation. In her 1981 debut, You Are Not I — recently rediscovered and refurbished, providing the impetus for Anthology's retrospective — Driver laid the groundwork for her eerily dissonant overlay of enchantment, terror, and tedium: Adapting a Paul Bowles story with longtime collaborator (and partner) Jim Jarmusch, who also shot the film on black-and-white 16mm, You Are Not I is an outer-boundary study in the mind's capacity to project its disturbance." Suzanne Fletcher plays Ethel, "who has somehow escaped from a nearby mental hospital in the flaming aftermath of a several-car pileup. She travels through a derelict zone to her sister's house, where the 'inconvenient' Ethel winds up in an unnervingly clenched domestic showdown.

New York. The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr opens today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Wednesday, and R Emmet Sweeney has a wide-ranging talk with the retired filmmaker. "Whether or not The Turin Horse turns out to be Béla Tarr's last film, as the gnostic, gnomic Hungarian master has claimed it will be, the sense of finality is absolute," writes the L's Mark Asch. Aaron Cutler for Moving Image Source: "Primo Levi writes in Survival in Auschwitz that the lowest point a human can reach is when he or she is forced to act without choice, performing tasks purely for his or her own survival. Freedom of choice is what separates humans from other animals. The Tarr crew (which, beginning with him and partner, Ágnes Hranitzky, has gone on to include a regular screenwriter [László Krasznahorkai], composer [Mihály Vig], and cinematographer [Fred Kelemen]) began by comparing humans to each other,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Feb. 21, 2012

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $34.95

Studio: Kino Lorber

The colorful "No Wave" cinema movement is explored in Blank City.

The 2010 documentary Blank City chronicles the “No Wave” and “Cinema of Transgression” film movements that emerged in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of cheap rent, excessive drug use and unbridled ambition.

In the movie, first-time director Celine Danhier examines the rise of the D.I.Y. independent filmmaking trend and its roots in the punk music, avant-garde art and cult cinema of the era.

In addition to a slew of archival footage, the film features new and vintage interviews with such filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Nick Zedd (Geek Maggot Bingo), Lizzie Borden (Born in Flames), Amos Poe (Alphabet City) and John Waters (Desperate Living), performance artists Ann Magnusum and Lydia Lunch, actor Steve Buscemi (TV’s Boardwalk Empire...

Constellation.tv recently send us information about this week's edition of Quality Films with Amos Poe, which happens every sunday night at 8Pm. Press Release: Quality Films Sunday At 8Pm Est with Nyu Professor And Filmmaker Amos Poe Every Sunday night at 8pm Est This Week: The Battle Of Algiers A live interactive discussion with one of the top minds in film during and after a classic movie...

Constellation.tv send us information regarding this week's upcoming episode on Quality Films with Amos Poe. This week's film will be "Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (The Eclipse)" starring Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. Press Release: A live interactive discussion with one of the top minds in film during and after a classic movie - right on your screen. Constellation, the first global movie...

Constellation.tv, in conjunction with Nyu film professor and filmmaker Amos Poe bring a unique series called "Quality Films with Amos Poe". The first film in the series is "Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon". The cost is $3.99 per film and the series will take place every Sunday night beginning 7/31 at 8pm Est. To reserve your e-ticket for the screening, you can goto: constellation.tv/quality.

Title: Blank City Director: Celine Danhier Featuring: Steve Buscemi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jim Jarmusch, Deborah Harry, John Lurie, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Susan Seidelman, Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Ann Magnuson and more The angry, dirty and unforgiving streets of New York City have over the course of several generations taken on an almost mythical role in American independent cinema, fueling some artists, creatively bankrupting many more, and driving others into the arms of more lucrative, mainstream projects. An exhaustively comprehensive oral history of outsider cinema from the late 1970s and into the mid ’80s, Celine Danhier’s Blank City unfolds in all the hazy, erudite specificity of some breezy, memories-laden conversation between your parents...

By David Savage

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The generation of subversive filmmakers who emerged out of the rubble of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1970s, who wrote, cast, produced and directed their own punk riffs on narrative feature films long before the digital revolution made it easy, has long gone without a proper documentary that chronicles their fascinating emergence during this era. Well, no more. Blank City, directed by French newcomer Celine Danhier, was one of the most talked about docs at festivals worldwide in 2010, and recently started its theatrical engagement at the IFC Center in Manhattan and across the USA at major indie-cinema venues.

Packed with film clips, period footage and insightful interviews with key players from the scene, such as Debbie Harry, John Waters, Ann Magnuson, Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Patti Astor and Jim Jarmusch, Blank City is a fascinating and inspiring documentary...

Director: Céline Danhier To be perfectly honest, I could probably just recycle my review of Downtown Calling and re-title it Blank City. Both documentaries adeptly cover almost the exact same timeline of Lower East Side history and they share a similar balance of talking head interviews (with some of the exact same heads, in fact) and archival footage. The only difference is that Downtown Calling focuses on the art and music scenes, while Blank City focuses on the underground film community. The only real striking difference is the lack of narration in Blank City (Deborah Harry narrates Downtown Calling). And just as the art and music scenes of the L.E.S. were incredibly diverse -- with only vague overarching commonalities that could possibly define them as cohesive communities -- so too was the film community. The filmmakers all shot on Super 8 film, repeatedly “go[ing] over the boundaries of millimeters...

The new issue (#6) of One+One: The Filmmakers Journal is now out with articles on the Zeitgeist Movement, Imperfect Cinema, Exploding Cinema and offers a filmmaking challenge. Oh, and Mary Poppins.Not sure how much longer these are going to be up, but you can watch some experimental shorts from the Images Festival on Mubi for free.The Lunch Movie recaps some of the wonders seen at this year’s Boston Underground Film Festival, which apparently included lots of vomiting.MediaBeat has notes from a discussion with Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman in which he advocates for media piracy. I don’t agree with what he says, but he has some interesting points.Time to rejoice! The Man Who Would Be Polka King is now streaming on Netflix. This hilarious true-life story is not to be missed if you have Netflix.Job Opening: The Austin Film Society is looking for a Director of Development.

Updated through 4/8.

"Less a movement than a barely unified period of gnarled transitions, No Wave is still best defined by its practitioners' aggressive nascence." Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant: "The shrugging cancellation implied by its title — and alternate name, the 'Blank' Generation — suggests the awkward cusps inhabited by New York City's art scene circa 1977; it was post-Warhol and Underground but pre-indie, post-Beat and hippie but pre-punk, post-bohemian but pre-gentrification. The environment lacked a cohesive ethos save for an obligatory disdain for studied mainstream culture. And though it encompassed the first works by artists such as Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, and Glenn Branca, nearly all of its participants would move on and mature by the mid 80s. No Wave was indeed so brief, baroque, and localized that it might be most conveniently considered an amorphous prototype."...

Reviewed by Randee Dawn

(from the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival)

Directed by: Celine Danhier

Produced by: Avivia Wishnow

Starring: Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, John Waters

Go to a New York film festival, you risk running into the same people. Go to the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009, and you risk running into the same movie.

True, Blank City and Burning Down the House: The Story of Cbgb (reviewed Here) are not really the same film. While one focuses on the rise and fall of New York’s punk music scene as seen through the lens of a legendary, infamous club, Blank City instead turns its lens on the independent film scene of much of the same period – a time before “independent film” barely even had a name, and was called anything from “No Wave” to “The Cinema of Transgression.”

But there is a wide area of...

Reviewed by Randee Dawn

(from the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival)

Directed by: Celine Danhier

Produced by: Avivia Wishnow

Starring: Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, John Waters

Go to a New York film festival, you risk running into the same people. Go to the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009, and you risk running into the same movie.

True, Blank City and Burning Down the House: The Story of Cbgb (reviewed Here) are not really the same film. While one focuses on the rise and fall of New York’s punk music scene as seen through the lens of a legendary, infamous club, Blank City instead turns its lens on the independent film scene of much of the same period – a time before “independent film” barely even had a name, and was called anything from “No Wave” to “The Cinema of Transgression.”

But there is a wide area of...

Blank City screened as a 'work-in-progress' at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 - it was both my first film and my first experience at any film festival. Blank City is a feature documentary that tells the story of the underground film movement in New York from the late 70s to the early 80s, and explores its ties to the East Village art and music scene of the period. So the Tribeca Film Festival was really the perfect place to showcase it for the very first time. We interviewed so many amazing people - Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Debbie Harry, Sara Driver, Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Fab 5 Freddy - and we had a lot of them join us for the Tribeca screening, which was great. Steve Buscemi had another premiere that night [Bette Gordon's Handsome Harry], but he took the time out to walk the red carpet with us and support the film,...

Here’s a brand new clip from Celine Danhier’s essential documentary on the wildly creative New York No Wave film scene of the early 1980s, Blank City. Appearing here are Steve Buscemi, Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, and others, and clips feature the Talking Heads, Eric Mitchell’s The Way it Is, and more. The movie opens April 6; for more visit the website. And watch this space for an interview with Danhier.

And here’s the trailer, which features shots from my favorite movie of this era, Underground USA

Blank City Official Trailer from Celine Danhier on Vimeo.

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Featuring Jim Jarmusch, Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, John Lurie, Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore,

Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Maripol, Ann Magnuson,

James Chance, Beth B, Scott B and John Waters

A Film By

Opening at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, April 6

Before there was HD there was Super 8. Before Independent film there was Underground Cinema. And before New York there was.well, New York. Once upon a pre-Facebook time, before creative communities became virtual and viral, cultural movements were firmly grounded in geography. And the undisputed center of American . some would say international . art and film was New York City. In particular, downtown Manhattan in the late 1970.s and 80.s was the anchor of vanguard filmmaking.

Blank City tells the long-overdue tale of the motley crew of renegade filmmakers that emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous period of New York History.

Featuring Jim Jarmusch, Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi, John Lurie, Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore,

Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Maripol, Ann Magnuson,

James Chance, Beth B, Scott B and John Waters

A Film By

Opening at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, April 6

Before there was HD there was Super 8. Before Independent film there was Underground Cinema. And before New York there was.well, New York. Once upon a pre-Facebook time, before creative communities became virtual and viral, cultural movements were firmly grounded in geography. And the undisputed center of American . some would say international . art and film was New York City. In particular, downtown Manhattan in the late 1970.s and 80.s was the anchor of vanguard filmmaking.

Blank City tells the long-overdue tale of the motley crew of renegade filmmakers that emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous period of New York History.

I was invited to speak in Amos Poe’s “Media & Mavericks’ Nyu Film School Undergrad class last month. Salman Rushdie and Abel Ferrara spoke before me. Patti Smith was set to follow (so does that mean I’ve opened for Patti?). How could I say no to Amos? Particularly when it was in such illustrious company? His offer to speak got me thinking about what have been the underlying philosophies that have helped me enjoy a prolific life in a capital intensive mass market art form. I entered the film world with the belief that I would be denied access to…...

Feb. 3

6:00 p.m.

Gene Siskel Film Center

164 N. State St.

Chicago, Il 60601

Hosted by: Conversations at the Edge

Chicago’s Conversations at the Edge hosts a night of classic movies by Vivienne Dick, one of the leading figures of NYC’s No Wave scene. The screening will last about 80 minutes and featuring short films from the late ’70s, including her most notable films She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) and Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979).

Born in Ireland and studying and living in places such as London, France and Germany, Dick eventually wound up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the mid-’70s. Although No Wave would never consolidate into a movement like the Cinema of Transgression that followed it, there was a loose coalition of low-budget filmmakers, such as Dick, Amos Poe, James Nares and more, screening films in unconventional places such as Max’s Kansas City and the New Cinema storefront theater.

This week’s Must Read is a long one, a real long one, but very much worth it. Writing for Off Screen, Media Studies professor Paul W. Salmon discusses the intense feedback loop of mainstream and website film criticism that simply reinforces the Hollywood system. If I hadn’t conceived of my “underground film loop” project before, I would have after reading this. For the record, I have no problem with the Hollywood system and love Hollywood movies, but that there’s slim to none discussion of outside offerings is sad. Salmon really gets into the specifics here, so that’s what makes the piece so great. (P.S. Thanks to Professor Tryon for turning me onto the article.) Here we go again: A longtime Melbourne Underground Film Festival stalker has been trying to get people to listen to his insane rants against the fest and its founder Richard Wolstencroft.

Wow, this is a long list this week. Enjoy!

Is Australia the most conservative country in the world right now? Luke Buckmaster of The Age newspaper reports that the illegal screening of Bruce Labruce’s gay horror movie L.A. Zombie at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival went off without any arrests. But Buckmaster was so thoroughly disgusted by the movie, he’s practically advocating for the censorship of it. What the hell did he think he was going to go see? Or maybe England is gunning for the Most Conservative Country Award. Electric Sheep reports on Srdjan Spasojevic’s controversial A Serbian Movie being pulled from FrightFest after British censors demanded almost four minutes of edits. While the film has, and will, screen freely here in the U.S. at festivals, who knows what the MPAA would say if the film were released here theatrically? The Australian Film Reviews...

The Portland Underground Film Festival running this weekend brought out a lot of preview write-ups: The Shadow Over Portland looks at some horror movie offerings; the Portland Mercury asked fest director Seth Sonstein for some picks; Bob Moricz scans a nice write-up on his own film in Puff written for the Willamette Weekly; and Oregon Live has some of its own picks. Michael P. Heneghan, director of the animated feature The Romantic, discusses his screening at the 2010 Boston Underground Film Festival back in March — and the troubles with submitting to fests in general. Amos Poe, one of the leading figures in the No Wave cinema movement, has penned a piece for Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film. It includes his inspiration for becoming a filmmaker — a story about Adolph Zukor of all people. Landscape Suicide gets lots of frame grabs from Jean-Luc Godard’s latest polemic Film Socialisme, and posts...

I thought I knew Amos Poe’s first film, but after reading his account of the early days of his career as well as Lower East Side film in general, it turns out that I didn’t. From his piece at Truly Free Film: My first Super 8 film, was a series of shorts made to the Beatles “White” album. I loved that record and came up with short stories or ideas for each song. My friends helped and “acted” in these films. With ”Rocky Racoon” I did single-frame animation, for “Dear Prudence”, I managed to convince the most beautiful girl in Buffalo – who wouldn’t otherwise have given me the time of day, let alone come out to play – to jump naked out of an abandoned hay-loft on a deserted farm and run through an oat field in slow-motion. I...

New York City has seen its share of artistic revolutions, though any kind of positive revolution might have seemed impossible in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The city was crippled by massive debt with no help from the federal government, and whole neighbourhoods were urban war zones as countless buildings were left abandoned or left to decay. Those who dared reside in areas such as the Lower East Side took their life into their hands just leaving their apartments. But out of this came the No Wave film movement, documented in Celine Danhier’s Blank City, an exploration of the films and filmmakers who managed to create a cultural revolution, one Super 8 film at a time. Artists such as Jim Jarmusch, Beth B, Debbie Harry, John Lurie, Amos Poe and Susan Seidelman share their stories of strange and exciting years of poverty and creativity, and how in many ways the poverty fueled that creativity.

(Filmmaker Susan Seidelman, above.)

by Jon Zelazny

In the early 80’s NYC cultural lull between Patti Smith’s retirement and Jay McInerney’s breakout, Nyu film school graduate Susan Seidelman did the scrappy shoestring indie film thing, resulting in her acclaimed feature debut Smithereens (1982).

Best known for her hit sophomore effort, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Seidelman continues to direct movies and TV shows featuring female protagonists… including the pilot for “Sex and the City” and her Oscar nominated short film The Dutch Master (1994), about a shy dental technician who ventures “into” a museum painting for flights of erotic fantasy.

Susan Seidelman: My husband Jonathan Brett—who co-wrote and produced The Dutch Master—and I had committed to living in Paris for a year because I was set to direct a feature for Polygram, a company that unfortunately went bankrupt. So we were kind of in a funk over there, and...

The Q and A after Saturday night's world premiere of Blank City turned into a veritable roll call of artists and icons from the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression film movements that began in late-'70s New York. Director Celine Danhier was joined by producer Aviva Wishnow and executive producers Dan Braun and Josh Braun at the front of the theater as they introduced many of the documentary's interview subjects who were in the crowd, among them Nick Zedd, Amos Poe, Richard Kern, Sara Driver, Charlie Ahearn, Patti Astor, and Pat Place. Once we finished craning our necks to see all the cult celebs in the crowd, the big question on everyone's mind was, 'Where can we watch all the films talked about in Blank City?' 'Good question. Next question,' joked Dan Braun. 'We hope that [Blank City] will generate interest for a lot of these films in some form.

And here's the rest, including the Midnight Section, all after the break.

Encounters

This collection of engaging and entertaining narrative features and documentaries, a mixture of dark comedies and lighter fare, offers work from returning filmmakers, established talent, and popular subjects, and includes 10 World Premieres. Included in Encounters are performances from Academy Award®-nominated actors Thomas Haden Church, Melissa Leo, Elisabeth Shue; directorial debuts from both Eric Bana and Cheryl Hines (from a screenplay by Adrienne Shelly); stories ranging from an ill-fated man's discovery of inspiration and happiness, dysfunctional families, and unrequited high school crushes to a doc on the emergence of New York’s independent film scene.

• Blank City, directed by Celine Danhier. (USA) - World Premiere, Documentary. Celine Danhier’s kinetic doc mirrors the urgent, anything-goes energy of her subject: the Diy independent film movement that emerged in tandem with punk rock in late ‘70s downtown New York.

• Apart from the world premiere of Michael Cuesta's Tell-Tale and one more festival screening and chance to shine for Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking, the selections are comprised of unknown projects, New York-based film productions that were completed in the last year, a bunch of films that receive a May theatrical release anyways and a batch of better than average films that were showcased at Sundance. Below you'll find the feature film selections for the Encounters, Spotlight, Showcase, Restored/Rediscovered and Midnight sections. EncountersBlank City, directed by Celine Danhier. (USA) - World Premiere, Documentary. Celine Danhier’s kinetic doc mirrors the urgent, anything-goes energy of her subject: the Diy independent film movement that emerged in tandem with punk rock in late ‘70s downtown New York. New interviews with a impressive array of artists including Amos Poe, Bette Gordon, Debbie Harry, Eric Mitchell, Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi,

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