Issue 3: Spring 2009
NEW YORK NO WAVE SUPER 8
Live @ 8, Galway
In the late 1970s, as a laboratory for neo-liberal policies, NYC underwent a process of radical social and economic transformation. City infrastructure, both social and physical, deterioriated. Unemployment was high, municipal trade unions were weakened, and corporate welfare substituted the welfare of the people. Just around the corner was the decade of crack cocaine, AIDS, and Reagonomics.
At this crux in the city's history of class struggle and war, No Wave erupted within the punk underground of Lower East Side. No Wave introduced a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized mood and texture over cohesive ‘realist' narratives. Collages of images and sound of striking, even violent contradictions work within a socially radical, anti-establishment framework, much as Dada operated.
So it is apt that Vivienne Dick, a doyenne of No Wave, should present two seminal No Wave films at Live @ 8, a monthly video and film showing in Galway. The venue, a bar overlooking the docks, reminds the historian that No Wave had been shown in rock clubs, bars, and temporary storefront cinemas as a rejection of both established and alternative art spaces.
Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979) is the story of a woman-child, played by Lydia Lunch, on the hinge of madness in a fucked-up world. Beauty is a fiercely feminist exploration of popular culture. Information erupts from TV screens and billboards. News coverage of serial killers and violently rebellious teens vie with Lucille Ball's transgressive housewife. Child abuse, it is implied in a shot of a billboard, is a ‘family tradition'. These televisual and print asides constantly disrupt the process of narrative identification.
Play also predominates. Dolls, whether in a girl's bed or in a chaotic seller's pile, are given close-ups. Attired in 50s-style clothes, a butch-femme couple dances to 50s music. A young woman, ostensibly the protagonist's mother, is baking, but she looks so young, you wonder if she is ‘playing'. Do these episodes depict past traumas? Or are they hallucinatory memories?
In Waiting for the Wind (1982), a 7-minute film by James Nares, radio fever is mounting high. A beautiful, naked man lies restlessly on a bare mattress. He twists, he turns, he contorts under the stark white sheets. Time is jagged. Color is stark and deep; chiaroscuro is the mood; we are waiting, just as Caravaggio's boys waited in their shadows.
The waiting is over. Suddenly, the wind inserts its invisible, but all too physical presence: a phone book, a decrepit white leather chaise lounge and other modern industrial objects are caught up in a mealstrom. At one point, a mirror the size of the frame reflects this chaotic scene, but not, of course, the culprit.
At last the camera zooms on a moon above the New York skyline. Just as a ‘traditional' finale approaches, this close-up is repeated multiple times, accompanied by a soundtrack of radio fuzz. The duplication reflects the disequilibrium caused by the murder of time. "Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations," David Wojarnowicz observed, "collected and collated into the forms and textures of thoughts." In the radio fever of the 70s and 80s, fantasies describe alienation and disjuncture, hallucinations by members of what Wojnarowicz had called "the industrialised tribe."
Also shown were three relatively recent films, the most notable being Christine Elmo's Three Moments in Istanbul. In the first moment, a young Turkish man beat-boxes a rave rythmn. America as a locale of cultural power displays itself in the Starbucks and other high street shops that serve as a backdrop, but the young man shows his control over this moment by saying, "Stop," at which point the frame blackens. "George Bush!" cries a boy, smiling into the camera. "America . . . George Bush!" Shirtless boys sing in Turkish, with obvious passion, while the camera surveys their bare chests, swimming trunks, arms wrapped around each other. In the last moment, no one speaks; the camera is turned on the back of a headscarved girl, sitting by the water. Are we asked to juxtapose her silence with the bravado and expressiveness of the boys? One isn't sure. Whose modernity is it?
-Phillina Sun