Street Cred

Related Content

• Facebook's Swoon a Symptom of Wall Street's Sickness
  May 22, 2012
• America's Petro-Terrorists: How Speculators Drove Up Oil Prices
  July 4, 2012
• Facebook Has Way Too Many Phonies
  August 2, 2012
• Debate 2012: Romney and Obama Attack, Jim Lehrer Loses Control -- the Media Room View
  October 4, 2012
• "Burn Wall Street": Otto von Danger Politicizes His Art
  May 2, 2012

More About

• Celine Danhier
• Amos Poe
• Celine Danhier
• Financial Markets
• Financial Markets

Blank City 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.
June 3-16, 2011