Description
Book SynopsisDowntown Film and TV Culture 1975–2001 brings together essays by filmmakers, exhibitors, cultural critics and scholars from multiple generations of the New York Downtown scene to illuminate individual films and filmmakers and explore the creation of a Downtown Canon, the impact of AIDS on younger filmmakers, community access to cable television broadcasts, and the impact of the historic downtown scene on contemporary experimental culture. The book includes J. Hoberman’s essay ‘No Wavelength: The Parapunk Underground’, as well as historical essays by Tony Conrad and Lynne Tillman, interviews with filmmakers Bette Gordon and Beth B, and essays by Ivan Kral and Nick Zedd.
Table of ContentsDowntown Cinema Revisited - Joan Hawkins
Acknowledgements
Downtown Body - Ward Shelley
Part I: Moments
Chapter 1: In the Movie-Viewing Machine: Essential Cinema and the 1970s - David Sterritt
Chapter 2: No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground - J. Hoberman
Chapter 3: At Last Real Movies: Super 8 Cinema from New York - Tony Conrad
Chapter 4: Downtown’s Room in Hotel History - Lynne Tillman
Part II: Scenes
Chapter 5: The Blank Generation and Punk/Downtown History - Mark Benedetti
Chapter 6: Birth of the Blank Generation - Ivan and Cindy Kral
Chapter 7: Downtown Godard - Jonathan Everett Haynes
Chapter 8: ‘A Crack in the Veneer’: A Conversation with Beth B - Beth B and Joan Hawkins
Chapter 9: Lydia Lunch, The Right Side of My Brain - Chuck Kleinhans
Chapter 10: Pleasure and Danger: Bette Gordon’s Variety - Joan Hawkins
Chapter 11: Interview with Bette Gordon - Bette Gordon and Joan Hawkins
Chapter 12: The Time of His Life: Spalding Gray - Laurie Stone
Chapter 13: Mixing Blag Flag, DIY, Lo-Fi, and Oulipo: Jon Moritsugu’s Mommy Mommy Where’s My Brain - Jack Sargeant
Chapter 14: Cast Iron TV and Friends: Artists’ Public Access in Manhattan - Terese Svoboda
Chapter 15: TV Party: A Cocktail Party That Could Also be a Political Party - Benjamin Olin
Chapter 16: The Case of Electra Elf: Towards New Possibilities of Underground Counterculture in the Twenty-First Century - Nick Zedd and David Sjöberg
Chapter 17: Cock Worship: Todd Haynes, Fassbinder, and Queer Praxis - Chris Dumas
Chapter 18: Downtown’s Queer Asides - Lucas Hilderbrand, Alexandra Juhasz, Debra Levine, and Ricardo Montez
Part III: Memorials
Chapter 19: Canonization and No Wave Cinema History - Mark Benedetti
Chapter 20: The Downtown Scene in the Digital Era - Laurel Westrup
Chapter 21: You Had to be There: The Downtown Archive and the Future of an Impossible Past - Richard Toon and Laurie Stone
Chapter 22: The Centre Cannot Hold: Blank City (2010) and the Problems of Historicizing New York’s Independent Cinema of the Late 1970s and Early 1980s - Juan Carlos Kase
Chapter 23: Experimental Film - Chris Kraus
Filmography and Videography - Mark Benedetti
