The "movie'' movies, our Narrative and Feature Film section, is full of the productions of the New York underground. The earlier ones are mostly from the "New Cinema'' movement of the late '70s, the self-consciously hip group that immediately succeeded the punks, sometimes styled "No Wave.'' New Cinema screening room entrepreneur Eric Mitchell's first feature is the startling Kidnapped (1978), straight-up, uncut Super-8 reels peering at a bickering gang of nightclub terrorists, junkies and intellectuals who kidnap the owner of the Mudd Club. Mitchell's second, Red Italy (1979; produced by Jim Jarmusch!), is a more accessible romance, styled after Bertolucci. (His later works, the best-known Underground USA and The Way It Is are not in distribution). The actor-director appears in other films by members of the group. These include Mitchell's appearance as a general in English abstract painter James Nares' low-budget costume epic Rome '78 (1978), the most elaborate New Cinema feature. Nares' film stars ``19th century artist'' David McDermott as the emperor Caligula, and a young Lydia Lunch as his treacherous wife. These Romans swear, smoke lots of cigarettes, and wander around New York's neoclassical buildings.
Amos Poe's The Foreigner (1978) also stars Mitchell, although Poe's film is a 16mm effort, a proto-punk classic featuring footage of bands like the Cramps and Erasers. Debbie Harry stirs the air of mystery and impending doom with a Dietrich-like appearance as the chanteuse in the alley. That alley ran alongside the Mudd Club, where Tina L'hotsky enjoyed a year-long reign as "queen.'' L'hotsky's short films Barbie and Snakewoman reflect the writer's humor, irony and sure command of filmic conventions. Her cameraman, Michael Oblowitz, does a lot of music videos today, but in the 1983 he shot King Blank in a hotel room near JFK Airport, an epic of ennui, a homage to sour spirit.
Outside this group lurked some of NYC's most productive filmmakers. The prolific "Bs,'' Scott and Beth, cranked out serials at Max's Kansas City rock club, then moved on to violent, noirish punk-inflected features (not now in distribution). Charlie Ahearn worked up Wild Style (1982), his celebrated cult classic of the early hip-hop scene with its break dance, rap and graffiti after two earlier features. The Deadly Art of Survival (1979) is a Super-8 look at the struggles of a Lower East Side kung-fu dojo master. Twins (1980) is a 16mm film about an identical pair of brothers, one a cop, one a crook, both played by performance artist Michael Smith. The film is a strange attempt to fuse an antique style of filmmaking (silent comedy) with modern performance style.
Paralleling all of these was the redoubtable Nick Zedd, perennial outsider and the original punk filmmaker. His Super-8 epic of a death-rock musician's cannibal cult They Eat Scum (1979) was panned by Variety and attacked in the Wall Street Journal, a notoriety that delighted the enterprising Zedd. He followed Scum with the cartoonish and mannered horror movie pastiche Geek Maggot Bingo, a self-critical epic meander starring punk rocker Richard Hell. At the same time Zedd acted in other films that made up what he called the "Cinema of Transgression,'' movies that directly engage death fantasies and brutal sexual escapades, most notably the Hardcore work of Richard Kern.
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