Everything was concocted in the measly eight blocks infested with rats and cockroaches of the Lower East Side of New York (now, the gentrified East Village) and it’s estimated that it mobilized, at most, a thousand people. But the music scene baptized as No Wave, and to a lesser extent, its cinematographic homologue of No Wave Cinema, have been in the past few years in the mouths of journalists and essayists more than ever, over three decades after the facts. Maybe they are movements more cited (as idealized reference) than truly known or studied, but the interest is there: testified by books like No Wave (Black Dog) and the photographic New York Noise (Soul Jazz) or retrospective documentaries like Kill Your Idols, Llik Your Idols or Blank City.
The compilation No New York, an idea that came to Brian Eno after assisting a festival in the neighborhood of TriBeCa in 1978, is considered the birth certificate of No Wave. A few months before the birth of the concept of “ambient music” with Music For Airports, Eno was wandering through the Big Apple to produce the second album of The Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food, when he became aware of some of the groups that played in the gallery Artists’ Space who detested “new wave” and therefore, The Talking Heads. He became especially interested in four of them, the ones that appear in the album: James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, D.N.A. and Mars. None of them sounded alike and they didn’t accept to be a part of any movement; regardless, they were united by their inclination for a raw sound, dissonance and atonality, repetitive rhythms, a dadaist inspiration, the despite to break away from the blues tradition (they claimed that, when it came down to it, punk didn’t stray from being a hyper version of the riffs of Chuck Berry), for a sentiment of being orphaned and a nihilist attitude of rejection and confrontation. Along the lines of “we couldn’t care less what you think of us”.
The majority of the groups associated with the volatile No Wave scene –taking a moment here to mention some of the more interesting ones like Bush Tetras, 8 Eyed Spy, The Notekillers, Red Transistor, Bill Laswell’s Material or Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls– would disappear within the two to three years after the casting of Eno, not without leaving their mark on key groups of american underground that would follow them, like Sonic Youth, Swans or Big Black. Simultaneously, “No Wave Cinema” would disintegrate having left the basis for a new independent newyorker scene: Jim Jarmush, Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo and the “Cinema of Transgression” of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern.
The majority of the groups associated with the volatile No Wave scene –taking a moment here to mention some of the more interesting ones like Bush Tetras, 8 Eyed Spy, The Notekillers, Red Transistor, Bill Laswell’s Material or Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls– would disappear within the two to three years after the casting of Eno, not without leaving their mark on key groups of american underground that would follow them, like Sonic Youth, Swans or Big Black. Simultaneously, “No Wave Cinema” would disintegrate having left the basis for a new independent newyorker scene: Jim Jarmush, Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo and the “Cinema of Transgression” of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern.
Amos Poe
was most likely who put down the building blocks to start shooting with zero budget, with guts. He did it in two films, both in 1976: Unmade Beds, with Debbie Harry, and The Black Generation (produced with Ivan Král, who was at the time the guitarist for Patti Smith’s band), considered one of the first punk documentaries.
In
Black Box (Beth B., Scott B., 1979) Lydia Lunch performs as a torturer for a mysterious paramilitary organization. In the box, a torment of noise and lights awaits the young man.
Here, the director John Lurie (also member of the group Lounge Lizards) chats about his bizarre space film Men In Orbit (1979), shot in his apartment under the influence of LSD.
Nina Canal (from the bands Ut and Gynecologists) and Adele Bertei (Contortions, Bloods) abuse their guitars in a fragment of Guérillere Talks (Vivienne Dick, 1978), film in which Ikue Mori (DNA), the omnipresent Lydia Lunch (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) and Pat Place (Contortions, Bush Tetras) also appear:
Trailer for Smithereens (1982), with Susan Berman and Richard Hell, punk icon that passed through groups like Television or The Heartbreakers and wrote the anthem “Blank Generation” with The Voidoids. This was Susan Seidelman’s debut, who three years later would direct Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna as part of the cast.
In the last few years there have been at least three documentaries that have discussed the period of No Wave (along with its neighboring fields) from different angles. Formally speaking, they offer much more conventional results than the material they are dealing with and, in attempting to preserve an idealized past and explain it through nostalgia they end up being the epitome of the “retromania” diagnosed by the journalist Simon Reynolds. It’s as if the expressions, both visual and sonorous, of No Wave resisted to being narrated chronologically and, even less, sandwiched between testimonies of talking heads. Part of their charm, without a doubt.
The first of them was S.A. Crary’s Kill Your Idols (2004), with the same title as the song by Sonic Youth. It doesn’t circumscribe exclusively to No Wave; but rather dedicates itself to investigating the supposed heirs of the movement. An I say “supposed” because the fact of stopping to analyze the “Strokes phenomenon” stands out as debatable. It’s a film of talking heads, although with a certain visual impact based on fragments of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern’s films. It takes off with an interview with Martin Rev of the electro-punk pioneers Suicide, in contrast with the New York Dolls and the glam party that dominated NY in 1972; then march in Lydia Lunch, Glenn Branca (Theoretical Girls), Arto Lindsay (DNA), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Michael Gira (Swans), Jim Thirlwell (Foetus); it mentions in passing No Wave as a cinematographic movement; traces a temporal ellipsis, a bit forced, to the Brooklyn of the decade of 2000, home to groups like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, a.r.e. Weapons or Black Dice; and finally dramatizes a generational clash, with representatives of the old No Wave guard calling the new generations mommy’s boys, thirsting for love from their audiences and funded by clothing brands.
Llik Your Idols (2007), by the French director Angelique Bosio, briefly and in passing evokes the musical origins of No Wave to then concentrate almost exclusively on the “Cinema of Transgression” in the latter half of the 80s with testimonies of, among others, the directors Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, the painter and performance artist Joe Coleman or the filmmaker and photographer Bruce Labruce. It presents the radicalism of the movement as a mere reaction to the conservative wave of the Reagan era in the United States, ignoring almost completely the debt, or paternal relationship, to No Wave Cinema.
The documentary that offers the most complete perspective on No Wave Cinema is probably the most recent Blank City (2010), by Celine Dahnier. It flirts with its relationships with other disciplines –music, performance or contemporary art– and scenes –from the Cinema of Transgression to a film with a bigger budget and a hip hop orientation like Wildstyle (Charlie Ahearn, 1983), passing through the Indie scene represented here by Jarmush and Buscemi– but it centers finally on directors like Mitchell, Nareas or Poe. Blank City is also the least nostalgic film out of the ones we have commented on: instead of relegating the No Wave films to a role of mere documentation or visual accompaniment, it emphasizes the expressivity and richness of the visual discourse of a group of poor young kids like rats that filmed whatever they felt like, against the elements. Breaking into unknown flats with stolen equipment, if necessary.
