Blank City, which opens this weekend at Miami Beach Cinematheque, is a self-defeating user-friendly primer on a group of films whose aura was enhanced by the fact that one had to brave scenester gatekeepers to find them.
A loose history of underground movies from the hybridized gallery-art/loft-rock/filmmaking scene that coalesced in downtown NYC in the '70s and early '80s, in punk's aftermath, Celine Danhier's chronology begins with Amos Poe's Unmade Beds (1976) and ends with the rise of MTV, real estate, Wall Street, AIDS, or whatever other external factor is to take the blame for the dry-up.
Along the way, there are glimpses of the CBGB-era films of Poe, Eric
Mitchell, and James Nares, and the '80s "Cinema of Transgression," which
encompasses the work of Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, and David Wojnarowicz.
Nothing in this assemblage of clips will convince anyone not already
sold on the enduring artistic importance of these movements beyond the
world bounded by 14th Street and the Holland Tunnel.
Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular
Please Kill Me model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine
grudging that made that tome so entertaining. Nor does she once
interrogate a parade of interviewees as they retell the legend of
guttered Olde NYC from upmarket contemporary surroundings--a decision
that ironically shows lickspittle respect for a scene marked by youthful
home rule.
