Blank City Blu-ray Review
They shoot movies, don't they?
Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, February 15, 2012
For a group of poor DIY filmmakers, musicians, and scenesters, it was the best of times and the worst of times: New York's
Lower East Side in the late 1970s and early '80s, when rents were down, crime was up, and all it took to be an artist was a
modicum of talent and whole lot of spontaneous,
let's just go out and do it ambition. Out of the city's squalor of run-down
tenements and garbage-strewn streets came No Wave, punk rock's bastard child--arty and abrasive, dissonant and nihilistic--
and the music went on to spawn a short-lived art and cinema movement that nested rat-like below 14th Street and east of
Broadway, only to be exterminated by AIDS, the Wall Street boom, and eventual gentrification.
Documentarian Celine Danhier's
Blank City charts the rise and fall of No Wave, specifically focusing on the ultra low-budget Super-8 and
16mm movies made by and starring the movement's key figures, some of whom are fairly famous today--Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, John Lurie--
while others have continued on in relative obscurity, cult figures known only to a
few especially hardcore cinephiles. Mixing oral history-type interviews with duped footage from several grainy No Wave films,
Danhier has created an impeccably researched evocation of a New York that is no more.
It's been called The Rotten Apple. This was the near-bankrupt New York of the late '70s, when Times Square was still porn-ified, blackouts loosed
anarchy on the streets, and artists could live on next to nothing, squatting in abandoned buildings or
renting rooms for a measly hundred bucks a month. Punk was the underground musical genre du jour, but the straight-
forward style of bands like The Ramones was already starting to fracture into clanging post-punk via Television, Blondie's
proto-New Wave danciness, and art-rock from The Talking Heads. In 1976, filmmaker Amos Poe--who had been documenting
the scene with home movie cameras--rented an editing booth from the Maysles brothers, took some speed, and in 24 hours
cut together
The Blank Generation, the first real punk rock film, which premiered at the famed mecca for musical
anarchy: CBGB's.
Soon after, the Lower East Side's own brand of stripped-down, often atonal and angular punk--which the local press came to
call No Wave--would emerge with bands like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and The Contortions. Musical proficiency
wasn't particularly valued, and if anything, being especially good at your instrument was suspect. In many ways, the No Wave
aesthetic--for music and film--was built around limitations. Can't play guitar? Start a band anyway. Can't afford a camera?
Buy a stolen one for cheap from the guy down the block. The point was simply to make art, on the fly and with a cavalier
and confrontational attitude. As Teenage Jesus frontwoman Lydia Lunch says here, "If you don't think it's any good, well, f--k
you."
Lunch is underground punk rock royalty, a singer and actress who was basically No Wave's Anna Karina, the movement's
ingenue and a muse for no-budget directors like Vivienne Dick, James Nares, and the husband and wife team of Scott and
Beth B. (All of whom sit down here to reminisce about the period.)
Blank City gives us a sense of how collaborative
and cross-medium the scene was; musicians were in movies, filmmakers were in bands, and everyone pitched in on everyone
else's projects.
Some of the early films that came out of the movement--Amos Poe's in particular--drew on the avant-garde influences of
Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, along with the more narrative-but-still-conceptual styles of directors like Godard, Antonioni,
and John Cassavetes. This sounds high-brow, but there's an unavoidably amateurish quality to nearly all of the No Wave
movies, partly because they were shot cheaply on 8mm stock--16mm if they were lucky--but mostly because they were shot
by
actual amateurs, who valued personal and political expression over technique. This was certainly the case when
No Wave morphed gradually into the so-called Cinema of Transgression--a term coined by the brooding Nick Zedd, director of
They Eat Scum and
Geek Maggot Bingo--which sought to shock audiences with taboo-busting obscenity and
coal-black humor. One of the few exceptions to the amateur aesthetic is Jim Jarmusch, who was trained at NYU and was an
assistant to legendary director Nicholas Ray (
Bigger Than Life) before making his breakthrough feature, 1984's
Stranger Than Paradise, using leftover film stock donated by Wim Wenders.
Most of the No Wave films have been forgotten, and for good reason: they weren't much good to begin with. But that's beside
the point.
Blank City doesn't really champion the No Wave directors unduly or make them out to be more important
to cinema history than they actually are. The documentary is really just an appreciation of a punk scene that briefly grew like
a mold in a particularly dank corner of New York, where the conditions were right for unbridled art and filmmaking. The tone is of aging hipsters
reminiscing about the good old days before Times Square was Disneyfied, when
artists could live and work in the city on a few dollars a day. If nothing else, they've got some impossibly cool stories to tell.
Like Jarmusch recounting how he had to drag a sleeping Jean-Michel Basquiat out of his shots when he was making
Permanent Vacation. Or Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore detailing his first nervous high school trips to CBGB's. Or John
Lurie faking a break in at his apartment so he could claim insurance money on his "stolen" saxophones. Now that's punk rock.
Blank City Blu-ray, Video Quality
Blank City isn't the disc you'll reach for when you want to demo your home theater system, but you knew that already. This
1080p/AVC-encoded Blu-ray presentation is one of those
this is is as good as it's ever going to look scenarios. The
documentary is split almost equally between recently recorded interview sequences--which were shot digitally, with what looks
to be prosumer-model cameras--and the No Wave films themselves, which vary greatly in picture quality, as you might
imagine.You'll see ultra-grainy Super-8 material and smeary, repeatedly duped VHS video footage. Some clips are fairly clean,
others scratched and murky; and while some are mastered in HD, most appear to have been transferred in standard definition.
Color, contrast, tonality, clarity--all over the place. But that's part of the charm; the no-budget No Wave films are
loveably grimy. As for the "talking head" interviews, they suffer from some chroma source noise and are never exactly
sharp sharp, but they get the job done. No real distractions here.
Blank City Blu-ray, Audio Quality
Ditto for the film's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, which does what it needs to do and not much more. Like
the picture quality, the audio for the film clips is all over the place--usually slightly muffled and thin--but that's unavoidable
when you're dealing with such D.I.Y. source material. What's most important is that the vocals during the interviews are always
clean, balanced in the mix, and easily understood. The rear channels probably aren't used enough to justify the use of a full 5.1
presentation, but occasionally music from one of the No Wave bands is bled into the surround speakers. It would be
amazing if Kino-Lorber had included a CD with songs from the film, but I get that licensing issues are tricky. If you really want
to own some No Wave music, a good place to start is
No New York a Brian Eno-curated album from 1978 that has
tracks from The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and D.N.A. It's still in print on CD and vinyl.
Do note that there are no subtitle options on the disc for those that might need or want them.
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