BLANK CITY: Opens @ the Nuart Friday, May, 27 -

BLANK CITY tells the long-overdue tale of a disparate crew of renegade filmmakers who emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous moment in New York history. From the late 1970's through the mid 80's, when the city was still a wasteland of cheap rent and cheap drugs, these directors crafted daring works that would go on to profoundly influence the development of independent film as we know it today.

Directed by French newcomer Céline Danhier, BLANK CITY weaves together an oral history of the “No Wave Cinema” and “Cinema of Transgression” movements through compelling interviews with the luminaries who began it all. Featured players include acclaimed directors Jim Jarmusch and John Waters, actor-writer-director Steve Buscemi, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, hip-hop legend Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, photographer Richard Kern as well as Amos Poe, James Nares, Eric Mitchell, Susan Seidelman, Beth B, Scott B, Charlie Ahearn and Nick Zedd. Fittingly, the soundtrack includes: Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The Contortions, The Bush Tetras, Sonic Youth and many more.

Made on shoestring budgets in collaboration with the pioneering musicians, visual artists, performers, and derelicts that ruled Downtown, the films surveyed in BLANK CITY are fitting documents of an exhilarating and unique cultural moment. This same legendary-but-fleeting period likewise birthed punk rock, hip-hop and Madonna, and brought New York City to the forefront of the international art world. Unlike the revered musical revolution of this era, this epoch of underground film has never before been chronicled.

BLANK CITY is a love letter to New York, a cultural portrait of Manhattan in the days before Reagan, big money, and gentrification forever altered the fabric of the city. Though a look back, the heart of BLANK CITY does not live in the past. In this new age of digital democracy, the maverick spirit of the New York Underground has risen again in emerging creative communities worldwide. The Do-It-Yourself ethos, audacious storytelling, and sense of urgency guiding "No Wave" and the "Cinema of Transgression" are more relevant and inspiring than ever.

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Blank City Official Trailer from Celine Danhier on Vimeo.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within - Saturday 2.26. on PBS.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within investigates the life of the legendary beat author and American icon. Born the heir of the Burroughs Adding Machine estate, he struggled throughout his life with addiction, control systems, and self. He was forced to deal with the tragedy of killing his wife and the repercussions of neglecting his son. His novel, Naked Lunch, was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer testified on behalf of the book. The courts eventually overturned the 1966 decision, ruling that the book had important social value. It remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century.

The film features never-before-seen footage of William S. Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues including John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Sonic Youth, Anne Waldman, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, V. Vale, Wayne Propst, Diane DiPrima, Dean Ripa (the world's largest poisonous snake collector), and many others, with narration by actor Peter Weller, and soundtrack by Sonic Youth. William Burroughs was one of the first to cross the dangerous boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950s, and write about his experiences. Eventually he was hailed the godfather of the beat generation and influenced artists for generations to come. But his friends were left wondering if he had ever found contentment or happiness. This extremely personal documentary pierces the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.

The Filmmaker -
Yony Leyser is a 25-year-old filmmaker living in Chicago, Illinois. He has directed several short films. After being kicked out of film school, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and began shooting William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, his first feature film.

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Wednesday 2.23. - Free-Flowing Spoken-Word with Writer/Director John Waters @ UCLA Live's Royce Hall.

Director, actor, author and all-around filth elder John Waters brings his wildly popular one-man show to UCLA Live’s Royce Hall Wednesday February 23, taking aim at Hollywood during the industry’s most self-indulgent week--the Oscars--with “This Filthy World Goes Hollywood.”

Waters has performed his free-flowing spoken-word lecture entitled “This Filthy World” at colleges, museums, film festivals and comedy clubs worldwide, including a 2010 appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Last year, Waters also played to a sold out audience at the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival and appeared in the Sydney Opera House.

In this UCLA Live appearance, the multi-talented artist focuses his rapid-fire wit on show business, the art world and his own lunatic career in a one-man vaudeville performance.

Independent filmmaker, sketch artist and actor (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) Matthew Gray Gubler serves as emcee and dynamic modern-rock artist Elvis Perkins opens the show with a solo set.

Waters’ sixth book, Role Models, debuted at No. 11 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list in May of 2010, also earning spots on the bestseller lists for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Waters other books include Shock Value, Crackpot, Pink Flamingos and Other Trash, Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs, and Art: A Sex Book (co-written with art critic Bruce Hainley).

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@ REDCAT Tonight - The Single Most Important and Influential Underground Movie Ever Released in America.

Jack H. Skirball Series

The Making and Unmaking of Flaming Creatures

A screening and talk with J. Hoberman from the Village Voice

Recognized as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Flaming Creatures was also reviled, rioted over, banned as porn, and pondered by the Supreme Court. “Jack Smith described Flaming Creatures as ‘a comedy set in a haunted movie studio.’ It is that, as well as the single most important and influential underground movie ever released in America,” according to J. Hoberman, film critic of The Village Voice for more than 30 years and an authority on the Smith performance and film oeuvre. “Smith’s movie was a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters but he never completed another.” Find out why. Hoberman’s books include The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties and Bridge of Light: Yiddish Cinema Between Two Worlds.

1963, 45 min., 16mm, b/w

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John Waters at Gagosian Gallery

Now Through May 23

There is no such thing as a bad movie frame.
-John Waters

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce “Rear Projection”, an exhibition of new photographs and sculpture by John Waters. “Rear projection” is a movie term for the process whereby a foreground action is combined with a background scene filmed earlier to give the impression the actors are on location when they are, in fact, working inside a studio. In Waters’ latest work, this artificial and outdated visual effect is embraced, attacked and taken to extremes.

Glorifying the struggle, humiliation, and wild excitement of a life in show business, Waters uses an insider’s bag of film tricks and trade lingo to celebrate the excess of the movie industry. Rewriting and redirecting existing film imagery snapped off the TV screen, he assaults, elevates, subtitles, and startlingly alters these one time classic, respected, even honored movies to attain a new kind of equality: a cult film that only needs one viewer – John Waters himself. Child stars are given bad habits (Children Who Smoke); innocent movies are perverted by editing out just a few frames (Santa Molester); even traditionally beautiful movie stars are glamorously deformed by suspiciously overbudgeted charity advertising campaigns (Hollywood Smile Train).

The cult of religion and the religion of cult are the same in Waters’s world, as in The Process (a cult that worshipped both Satan and Jesus) and Idol #2, Waters’s un-ironic beatification of singer Johnny Mathis. He sneaks into other movies like a spy to photograph the very details that their original directors didn’t notice. Waters revels in the terrible frustrations of today’s film business combined with the hostility that outsiders feel towards the contemporary art world, hoping to bring into focus a fresh breed of humor, cheap (but satisfying) sexual thrills, and a shabbily elevated artistic appreciation that must always start from the back of the line.

Gagosian Gallery