Showing as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2011
Celine Danhier/ USA/ 2010/
In a special one-off screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre, Monorail Film Club introduce this documentary charting No Wave film-making – New York City’s no-budget DIY film movement of the late seventies and early eighties. The GFF has had a bit of a bohemian NYC thread running through it, with screenings at the CCA of the very weird-ass short films that came out of this scene, as well as quirky Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl and the contemporary-set The Imperialists are Still Alive! As a companion to these fiction films, perhaps is in there to provide a little context. Contributions by the likes of Thurston Moore, Debbie Harry and Lydia Lunch show how intertwined this film scene was with the NYC underground music scene, both embracing a DIY approach, using the cheapest materials and technologies, as well as stealing more expensive stuff like film stock, amidst a general atmosphere of anarchy and lawlessness in a bankrupt, crumbling, low-rent, criminal New York City very different to the blinging Carrie Bradshaw city of today.
Hopping playfully from one Super 8 film clip to the next, and from one interviewee to the next, Blank City relies entirely on the colourful anecdotal accounts of the contributors to cumulatively build up a factual picture and allow their stories and their films speak for themselves. The inspirational scene charted by this interesting and entertaining documentary looks like it was a lot of fun, although it’s debatable as to whether the films have as much merit as standalone works of art compared with the exciting process of making them. This makes Blank City more a celebration of process rather than product, and as the contributors talk us through the decline of the scene, it comes across as a loss of innocence. When the media took notice and some artists started to make a lot of money, the commercialisation of the scene paralleled the commercialisation of the city, as a brutal programme of gentrification made NYC safe for property developers, Wall Street and Sex and the City. Perhaps the GSA students present at the screening will have come away from it thinking that maybe, just maybe, economic collapse can be fun sometimes.