It’s music history time, but in an awesome way. Blank City takes you into the emerging independent film/music scene in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the heart of the East Village in New York City. Wow. Yeah. It’s exactly what you think it is and it’s got the best soundtrack to back it up. The filmmakers were only limited by their imagination (ok and maybe a crime-ridden city and virtually no budget) in this documentary by first-time french director Celine Danhier. She captures stories told by the people who lived it. Rent was cheap or non-existent. Sometimes people just squatted and hoped for the best. As the independent music scene developed, so too did film, and using friends, artists and unknown actors, these new directors made the films they wanted on next-to-nothing budgets using Super 8 cameras.
Interviews with Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers), Steve Buscemi (everything awesome but you probably remember him from Fargo), John Waters (Hairspray) and Richard Kern (Fingered) really tell a story of the struggles and the creativity of a time when music and film were intertwined. One of the wonderful things about independent film is the lack of constraint on imagination and creativity. Because there is no one to answer to, the filmmaker can create a world and a story that is completely their own.
Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Junior in Eric Mitchell’s film The Way It Is, featured in BLANK CITY
Using footage from these films along with interviews, I really got a sense of how much people were passionate about their craft. They did anything and everything just to make a movie. How can you not admire that?
Rating: Raw and unhinged treat for the eyes and ears. Worth every second. 8/10
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