New York City, 1983: The streets are cluttered with garbage. Men gather in flocks to stalk, harass and assault passing women. Looting and rioting run rampant outside while TV screens and newspapers inform the public that the government is working tirelessly to address the dysfunction plaguing the city. The government provides jobs for minorities and the poor, but the jobs are menial and poorly paid, hardly enough to live on. More than one group has formed in opposition to the government’s empty rhetoric—more than one group of women. These organized women resort to guerrilla media tactics to broadcast their grievances and demands to the public. Despite the increasingly dissonant assurances of the government, the notion prevails that things are building to a breaking point.
The above paragraph is a summary of director Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film Born In Flames, a radical feminist dystopia in which a peaceful social democratic revolution replaces the existing American party system with a nominally progressive government that retains the same tenets of institutional sexism, racism and hostility to the working classes (the Criterion Collection will release a new edition of the film on September 16). Read without this context, the same paragraph offers a largely accurate appraisal of the real New York City in which Borden shot the film, a crumbling metropolis in the midst of the worst economic crisis of its lifetime, where opportunistic malcontents came in droves to squat and scheme on the cheap.
The five years during which Borden shot the film on and off due to various scheduling and funding inconsistencies also roughly span the lifetime of the No Wave Cinema movement. Coined by critic J. Hoberman in a feature for The Village Voice on Vivienne Dick, another icon of feminist underground film and contemporary of Borden’s, the term “No Wave Cinema” categorizes the movement alongside the broader post-punk New York arts scene. According to Hoberman, “Rejecting the increasingly academic formalism that has characterized the 1970s film avant-garde, as well as the gallery-art of video, [no wave cinema] represents a partial return to the rawer values of the underground of the 1960s (Jack Smith, Ron Rice, the Kuchar brothers, early Warhol).”
The cast and crew of Borden’s film includes several figures who would become representative of the movement. Adele Bertei of The Bloods and James Chance and The Contortions plays the host of a radio station called “Radio Ragazza,” almost certainly a reference to Radio Alice, the Italian public access radio station via which theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi executed numerous media sabotage campaigns as part of the country’s Autonomia workers’ collective. This movement is known in America due to a Semiotext(e) anthology edited in part by director Kathryn Bigelow, who appeared in Born In Flames as a feminist newspaper editor only a year or two after releasing her own no wave debut, The Loveless. Other collaborators include no wave regular actor Mark Boone Junior, cinematographer Michael Oblowitz, whose King Blank would become another representative work of the genre and a young Eric Bogosian in his first onscreen appearance.
Also visible in several scenes is Pat Place, another onetime Contortion member and later a founding member of Bush Tetras, who bears the distinction of having appeared in films by almost every no wave director, including Borden, Dick, Eric Mitchell, Jamie Nares and Scott and Beth B. In Dick’s Staten Island, Place walks around a trash heap in a jumpsuit while Telstar plays. In The Guerillere Talks, Place reads a letter, presumably from one of her parents, with a microphone taped to her arm. She holds a lightbulb plugged into an outlet in her hand and shines it in front of one eye and then the other. In another shot, she tries to hammer a nail into her head. She treats her body like a part of the set or a piece of equipment. In the films, Place plays with toys, including a toy lizard that appears in both. Outside Dick’s films, Place’s roles are always minor, but her appearance onscreen has a way of notarizing a no wave film as authentic.
Bertei is arguably the most ubiquitous and foundational no wave scenester to appear in the movie. Her records with Chance, himself a star of several no wave films, were flagship products of ZE Records, whose founder Michael Zilkha partly funded the New Cinema, where many of the movement’s films would premiere. Bertei also starred in Scott and Beth B’s The Offenders, another no wave staple with a plot remarkably similar to that of Born In Flames: Bertei leads an all-female gang in a war against a rival gang led by “The Lizard,” played by John Lurie, one of the biggest artists to emerge from the no wave movement, as an actor and as a musician. The movie is full of cameos, but it’s most memorable as a standoff between Lurie and Bertei, whose tough-talking New York posturing communicates worlds of insight regarding the beliefs and lack thereof animating the movement.
Lurie’s memoir The History of Bones is one of the most revealing documents of the no wave movements, particularly regarding the precarious financing that determines much of what distinguishes their aesthetic products. According to Lurie, who lived at the time in one of a series of “government-run railroad apartments for $55 a month,” much of the movement was funded by crimes like “traveler’s check scams.” This is how Lurie and director Eric Mitchell, who bought the projector at the New Cinema with Zilkha’s loan, originally planned to fund Lurie’s first film, Men In Orbit. Mitchell took out a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, Lurie took them to banks to cash them, having learned to forge Mitchell’s signature, Mitchell reported the money stolen and the bank paid it back. This worked not just once but many, many times.
Lurie is not alone in crediting Mitchell with pioneering many of the practices that would later be associated with no wave cinema. “The credit goes to Eric Mitchell,” he says. “This was what I had gotten from Eric: Just shoot it. Just do it now. You have the film? Just make something. Roll up your sleeves and attack. Kamikaze style.” Mitchell’s Underground USA, which includes performances by Lurie, Taylor Mead and Rene Ricard, is recognized along with Amos Poe’s Blank Generation as one of the definitive documents of the broader Lower East Side arts scene of the time. In 1985, Mitchell’s The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues would mark the screen debuts of both Vincent Gallo and Steve Buscemi, at the time a firefighter with Engine 55, now a historical landmark that survived an era when so much of the city’s history literally went up in flames.
The precarity that governed the no wave cinema movement was not just a function of the typically impecunious nature of urban art scenes; in the production background as well as the content of most no wave cinema, a broader socioeconomic decay in the city itself is apparent. In 1975, New York was unable to repay its short-term debt to lending banks. The city cut 65,000 municipal jobs, froze wages for city workers, significantly cut back assistance services for the poor, raised the fare for public transit and eliminated free city university tuition. In 1979, when the city was on the brink of a tuberculosis epidemic, the highest number of cases was in the Lower East Side. The main factors contributing to the spread were poverty rate, overcrowding in housing units and population density.
The economic crisis arose as a result of several factors, but one of the most significant was the implementation of policies designed to accelerate decay in certain neighborhoods populated by the low-income minorities the city government was eager to purge. The intentional closure of fire companies in these neighborhoods facilitated an outbreak of fires, both accidental and not, that became emblematic of the “benign neglect” of these populations. Between 1972 and 1991, four fire companies in the Lower East Side were closed. This was the largest number of closures in Manhattan and the third largest number in the city, behind the South Bronx and Brownsville. Under Mayor Ed Koch, between 1982 and 1985, sixty new office buildings were built below 96th Street. At the same time, poverty increased from 17 to 25 percent. The number of people living without housing increased to an estimated 60,000 and the high school dropout rate to 54 percent.
Borden wasn’t the only no wave filmmaker to explicitly call out these inequities in her work. Rome ‘78, Bertei and Chance bandmate Jamie Nares’ debut feature and a who’s who of the no wave ecosystem, satirized the city’s ills in a sword-and-sandal send-up set in an alternate-universe version of Ancient Rome. In one scene, Caligula, played hilariously by David McDermott, proposes an economic plan whereby all children are disinherited and all inheritance is entrusted to the state—specifically the emperor himself—and when the state needs money, it murders people to assume control of their estates. In practice, such a system might not be dissimilar to a government cutting public programs to allow neighborhoods to decay and then selling the properties in those neighborhoods to developers who will build on them for profit.
Although their artistry is limited, no wave films are ambitious in scope and vision. The Bs’ are about corporate espionage and political assassinations, Poe’s are pastiches of existential narrative and Rome ‘78 is an epic historical melodrama. The plot of the Bs’ Vortex, while totally unrealistic, is genuinely intriguing, if not politically resonant. Lydia Lunch plays a female private investigator hired to investigate the assassination of a Congressman named White. The police are investigating the incident as a terrorist attack, but White’s staff has evidence implicating a corporation with which White has recently had unpleasant dealings. Lunch’s detective is already aware when she gets the assignment that White is the head of the Defense Appropriations Committee. The corporation he’s involved with is developing a weapon for the Department of Defense. The movie is too tonally inconsistent to ask any incisive political questions, but it has these questions on its mind.
Despite this keen awareness of the contradictions among which they produced and shot their films, however, the no wave filmmakers were not usually as politically outspoken or firmly aligned in their commitments as Borden. Much no wave cinema was decidedly ambivalent to politics, in accordance with the character of the broader punk and no wave movement. While the Scott and Beth B films always included references to the systemic realities of corporate greed and government opportunism, The Offenders presents the crimes of its main antagonists not as moral failures or as justified responses to social unrest but as simple facts of life in late twentieth-century New York. The Lizard supposedly has some political argument against Bertei’s character Laura’s father; according to Laura, The Lizard is no different from her father; to The Lizard, Laura herself is a rich girl. Everyone seems to be deluded in some way about their class position.
If ambivalence to political reality was the modus operandi of the no wave cinema movement, its splinter movement The Cinema of Transgression was animated by outright hostility to all social contracts. Named by director Nick Zedd in his self-published manifesto, the Cinema of Transgression existed to showcase all of the violence, sexual deviance and overall depravity of the Lower East Side arts scenes of the early 1980s. In films like Zedd’s Geek Maggot Bingo, starring Cookie Mueller and Richard Hell, and the short films of Richard Kern, the excesses of a late capitalist society more interested in extracting profit than protecting whole classes of at-risk citizens are made literal in extended sequences in which the human body is debased and treated as disposable.
The Cinema of Transgression emerged in part as a reaction to the moral panic about speech then wracking the American conservative community. As Poe starlet Debbie Harry says in her memoir Face It of her experience making David Cronenberg’s Videodrome—itself a statement about transgression in cinema—“At that time, people had started talking about ‘video nasties,’ which were movies on video that contained sex or violence that supposedly made viewers leap off their sofas and rush out and commit acts of perversion or violence. The week that I went to London to promote the movie, they were actually debating in Parliament about putting age restrictions on videos, and some of my interviews were canceled as a result.” Abel Ferrara’s 1979 The Driller Killer, a film frequently associated with the no wave movement, was prosecuted by the Director of Public Prosecutions as criminally obscene material.
In this atmosphere, Born In Flames stands out as subversive in every respect. The no-budget, DIY, fuck-the-institutions ethos of no wave is fully on display, as are the analyses and demands of the second-wave feminist and deconstructionist Marxist movements. The parallax gap between these two philosophical points of view lends the film a unique tension, an uncanny quality that reveals it as both the most and least fashionable possible product of the time and place of its making, as if today’s Brooklyn Left made a movie in today’s Dimes Square. Perhaps for this reason, what begins as an almost Debordian exercise in extended onscreen agitprop eventually streamlines into a genre exercise in the nuts-and-bolts plot dynamics of insurrectionary media sabotage.
Born In Flames is arguably the last true no wave film. In 1984, the year after its release, Harry appeared in Videodrome and Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise, a film incorporating all of the movement’s trademarks and multiple of its participants, but directed by film student Jim Jarmusch. The film premiered at Cannes, where two years earlier, Smithereens, starring Hell and Mueller but directed by another film student, Susan Seidelman, would compete for the Palme d’Or. Film schools and festivals were decidedly not a part of the no wave ethos; Lurie devotes much of his memoir to debunking the myth that Jarmusch led the movement to mainstream success, painting him instead as an outsider who simply capitalized on it. Jarmusch went on to work with everyone from Adam Driver to RZA, and Seidelman’s next movie was Desperately Seeking Susan, starring Madonna.
Borden’s next film was also a bigger success by no wave standards, but her career did not take off in the same way. Working Girls was a tighter narrative that extended Borden’s experience working with sex workers on Born In Flames into a feature starring and focused on women in the field. The film was well received and would have allowed Borden far more access to the Hollywood studio system if not for a feud with Harvey Weinstein, who, in Borden’s words, “threatened to destroy [her] career” for refusing to comply with his demands regarding the sexual content of her 1992 drama Love Crimes. Bigelow, meanwhile, has since become the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Picture for one of a number of films many have criticized for propagandizing the American government’s military campaigns in the Middle East.
The majority of the filmmakers associated with the no wave movement are remembered now only for their original contributions, which routinely screen in exhibitions at museums like MoMA. Many, like The Offenders and King Blank, have never been released in any media other than the film on which they were originally shot and can only be seen now in museum contexts. The Criterion release of Born In Flames is not just overdue recognition for a great undersung filmmaker—it’s a new opportunity to reexperience a New York City that, in so many ways, no longer exists. In the film’s final shot, the top of one of the towers of the World Trade Center explodes. To say a film like Born In Flames could not be made today would understate the matter.
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