Featuring Jim Jarmusch, Deborah Harry, Steve Buscemi, and Lydia Lunch. Rated 14A. Playing Friday to Thursday, September 2 to 8, at the Vancity Theatre

The punk-art scene of New York’s East Village and Lower East Side, born of desperate imagination and largely extinguished by AIDS, had a relatively brief time in the cigarette-hazed sun, but it left behind some incendiary documents. The late-’70s music revolution at CBGB, with bands like Television, Talking Heads, and the Ramones on-stage long before they had recording contracts, has been picked over already. But as head Lounge Lizard and Stranger Than Paradise star John Lurie explains in Blank City, which captures the DIY foment of that moment, “Nobody did what they knew how to do. Musicians were painting and painters were making films.”

A Parisian new to Manhattan, first-time docmaker Celine Danhier has the zeal of a recent convert, and she gets great quotes from players in that polymorphous atmosphere, when New York City was spiralling into poverty and violence.
Among others, musos Lydia Lunch, Thurston Moore, and Deborah Harry, as well as movie people Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Susan Seidelman, Bette Gordon, and Steve Buscemi illuminate the no-budget crossbreeding that went into the visual side of the No Wave scene, with grainy 8mm clips showing what the fuss was about (and some are surely well-served by being brief).

Innovation soon gave way to aggressive competition, with Reagan-era undergrounders attempting to one-up each other and flip off society as things shaded into the Cinema of Transgression. The upside was that grungy nihilists began mingling with more optimistic tag artists (like Fab 5 Freddy) and hip-hop deejays, and a healthier, multi-ethnic crossover began. Whether this gave life to another movement, and whether that one’s still alive, is up to the viewer—and future historians—to decide.

Watch the trailer for Blank City.