“’Blank City’ provides a vivid, vicarious tour…[Ms. Danhier] illuninates a hectic and fascinating place and time, bringing it back to life and tracing its continuing influence…The point of ‘Blank City’ is neither to celebrate the ones who made it big nor to scold the sellouts. The movie aims, rather, to evoke a moment in as much detail and with as much insight as will fit into 95 minutes. In this it succeeds beautifully.”

- A.O. Scott (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

"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. In the late 1970's and 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."

- Insurgent Media

"Ms. Danhier manages to conjure a glorious and grungy bygone past without fetishizing it as a golden age. A bunch of people got together and did some stuff, and this is what it looked like."

- A.O. Scott (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

"In the end, Blank City becomes not just a salute to the artistic adventurousness of a bygone New York, but a reminder that new strains of creativity keep emerging, just when the scene looks stalest."

- Noel Murray (The A.V. Club)

" But Blank City is more than just a correlative correction; it's a complementary portrait of how, just like Blondie, Basquiat et al., these wasteland mavericks created their own zeitgeist out of urgent desperation and urban decay. Let a thousand scummy, rat-gnawed flowers bloom once again."

- David Fear (Timeout)

"'Blank City,' a documentary by neophyte filmmaker Celine Danhier, does a first-rate job of remembering. She combines scenes from the era’s rarely shown underground movies (“Fingered” and “War Is Menstrual Envy” among them) with new interviews with the renegade artists who thrived artistically way back then. They include Debbie Harry, Jim Jarmusch, Patti Smith, Steve Buscemi, Sara Driver, Lydia Lunch, Amos Poe, John Waters, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell and Susan Seidelman. They were young, broke and idealistic, and nothing gave them greater pleasure than offending people."

- V.A. Musetto (New York Post)

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• BLANK CITY •

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. In the late 1970′s and 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.

Blank City from Heather Amour on Vimeo.

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• FILM STILLS FROM DOCUMENTARY •

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• SOME OF THE FILMS FEATURED IN BLANK CITY •

"Pier Paolo Pasolini is a great filmmaker, one of cinema's true artists."

- Lloyd Hughes (The Film Buff's Catalog)

"Pasolini was certainly among the most intriguing and controversial of contemporary directors."

- The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia

"Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, philosopher, and filmmaker, came of age during the reign of Italian fascism, and his art is inextricably bound to his politics. Pasolini's films, like those of his early apprentice Bernardo Bertolucci, began under the influence of neorealism. He also did early scriptwriting with Bolognini and Fellini. Besides these roots in neorealism, Pasolini's works show a unique blend of linguistic theory and Italian Marxism."

- Tony D'Arpino (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia)

"Pier Paolo Pasolini is among the most challenging and important directors of the postwar European Marxist cinema."

- Christopher Sharrett (Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film)

"In his poetry, journalism, novels and films, Pasolini championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy."

- Ian Thomson (The Guardian)

"He had a vision of literature and art and politics and social life that no one else in Italy had in the second part of the 20th century."

- Paolo Barlera (director of the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco)

""Everything was autobiographical with Pasolini. What he was thinking about, caring about, obsessed about. He exteriorized - into an art form for other people to consume - what was going on in his mind. The movies have to be understood in those terms."

- Barth David Schwartz

"He was really unique, one of a kind. And his life touched on everything that was culturally important. There was nothing without his fingerprints on it."

- Barth David Schwartz

"He was very shy, but inside of him there was a strong character, the soul of a poet, and his intellect."

- Ninetto Davoli

"Pier Paolo Pasolini was a prophet of our times: a social outcast with a voice crying in the wilderness who spoke candidly against conformity - which for him meant oppression. He is a filmmaker with an overpowering poetic inspiration. Against all attempts to tame life and make it rational, he depicted the instinctual side of humanity, at times brutal but open to authentic religious faith."

- Mauro Battocchi (Italy's consul general in San Francisco)

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• DOCUMENTARY FILMS FEATURING PASOLINO •

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• BIOGRAPHY •

Celebrated the world over as one of the central figures of the postwar Italian cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) is recognized in his native land as arguably the most important Italian artist and intellectual of the twentieth century. A gifted writer and penetrating thinker, Pasolini was already renowned as a poet, novelist, critic and screenwriter before he directed his first film, Accattone, in 1960. Pasolini remained prodigiously industrious as a writer and political activist throughout his career, even as his films brought him greater celebrity – and notoriety – during the last fifteen years of his life, often overshadowing other facets of his remarkably diverse accomplishments. An outspoken but unorthodox leftist, Pasolini attracted controversy from all sides of the political spectrum, with his often sexually explicit and willingly perverse films drawing the frequent ire of Italian censors. With his penchant for political critique and stylistic reinvention, Pasolini is in some ways the Italian counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard. Despite his obvious glee in shocking the bourgeoisie, Pasolini was also a thoughtful, even philosophical, filmmaker who bridged the gap between the post-neorealist group led by Fellini and Antonioni and the generation of Young Turks that included Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio.

Pasolini’s cinema is perhaps best remembered today for its unbridled sexual imagination and its often shocking depictions of violence and unorthodox sexuality. Equally important to his oeuvre, however, is Pasolini’s adamant rejection of the contemporary world. A profound nostalgia for a pre-modern way of life is expressed across Pasolini’s films, in which the magical and the pagan supersede rationality and religion, and an anarchic, polymorphous eroticism replaces what Pasolini regarded as the sharply alienated and alienating state of modern existence. Pasolini refined an extraordinary visual style to express this worldview, favoring static frontal shots evocative of pre- and early Renaissance painting. Most of all, however, Pasolini prized a mode of radical stylistic impurity, using Bach and Vivaldi, for example, as the unlikely yet profoundly fitting soundtrack to his visions of life in the Roman slums. This daring juxtaposition of “high” and “low,” a poetic version of the Marxist dialectic, remained one of Pasolini’s most influential stylistic touches.

During his career a major source of Pasolini’s notoriety was his open homosexuality, a then-rare position that he actually had little choice in establishing. In 1949, while living and teaching as a regional poet in northeast Italy, Pasolini was outed and promptly charged with corrupting a minor, resulting in the loss of both his teaching post and his membership in the Italian Communist Party. The subsequent scandal prompted Pasolini to flee to Rome and, in retrospect, may have inadvertently hastened his rise to prominence in Italian literature. Today Pasolini’s grisly and still unsolved murder, perhaps at the hands of a teenaged hustler, has permanently linked his homosexuality to his public profile.

Pasolini announced his unique style and approach to narrative with his first three works– Accattone, Mamma Roma and The Gospel According to Matthew – which each offer a reworking of the legacy of postwar Italian neo-realism. In the mid-1960s Pasolini made an abrupt turn by attempting to create his own version of a popular cinema, casting the comic star Totò in a group of films, most notably Hawks and Sparrows, using humor and allegory to critique the changes brought about by Italy’s economic and industrial boom. The tepid response to these unusual comedies inspired Pasolini to proclaim allegiance to “unpopular cinema,” and turn to the melding of myth and scathing political critique that resulted in Oedipus Rex, Medea and Pigsty. Pasolini changed course again with his “Trilogy of Life,” an unprecedentedly accessible series of literary adaptations – The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights – until finally rejecting these films with the savage Salò, the ultimate film maudit, which he finished just days before his premature death.

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• ARTICLES OF INTEREST •

* Pasolini Overview

*The Tragic Figure In Italian Cinema

* Pier Paolo Pasolini Interview 1965

* Pasolini's Legacy: A Sprawl Of Brutality

* The Lost Pasolini Interview

* Pasolini's Last Interview

* Pier Paolo Pasolini

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• FILM STILLS •