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Cinema of transgression
New York´s Lower East Side has
always been a cheap, low-rent space, a natural
zone for artists, filmmakers and musicians surviving on their
wits while trying to create New York. In the late Seventies and
early Eighties, following th punk explosion and the election of
Ronald Reagan with his New Right agenda, the downtown underground
film scene exploded. Taking their inspiration from the extreme
and brutal noise/jazz/post-punk No Wave music scene, a variety of
filmmakers, photographers, performers, actors, and artists began
to explore new, direct and confrontational modes of cinematic
expression.
These filmmakers - including
Richard Kern, Beth B, Nick Zedd and Kembra
Pfahler - produced movies that were influenced by both the
aesthetic extremes of the exploitation movies playing in the
sleazy grind house cinemas on 42nd Street, and the vicious
extremities of daily existence: drugs, sexual brutality, poverty
and nihilism. Altough their individual styles and concerns
differed widely, these filmmakers shared a desire to vent their
scream on celluloid. Whilst the films sought to break with the
formalism of the academic, structuralist avant-garde, the work
these filmmakers produced revealed the influence of such diverse
fringe filmmakers as Jack Smith, Otto Muel, Luis Buñuel, Russ
Meyer and John Waters, directors with whom they shared a
confrontational aesthtic if not an immediality recognisable
style.
The availabity of cheap cameras and projectors, and sync-sound Super 8 film enabled these filmmakers to produce their work at low cost, and the expansion of video technologies enabled easy dissemtation to a wide audience. This process was aided by the publication of the fanzine The underground film bulletin, edited by Zedd under the pseudonym Orion Jeriko. This occasional publication featured interviews with these filmmakers and pieces on their contemporaries/some time associates such as Jeri Cain Rossi, "kick ass badboy" Jon Moritsugo and eperimental animator M Henry Jones.
In 1985 the fourth issue announced the manifesto for the Cinema of Transgression, a "movement" that sought to transform values by breaking all taboos associated with cinematic representation, conservative religion, traditional politics, and acceptable aesthetics. Although perhaps a strategic gesture (certainly not all of the filmmakers shared Zedd´s agenda), this manifesto enabled the burgeoning scene to gain a degree of notoriety. The underground press, and especially the magazine Film Threath, began to take notice of the filmmakers associated with this "movement" - enabling a larger distribution network for the films these directors produced.
