No Wave Cinema was a Colab sponsored boom (1976–1985) in underground filmmaking on the Lower East Side of New York City. Its name, much like its cousin No Wave music, was a stripped down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized mood and texture above other concerns.
This brief movement, also known as New Cinema (after a short-lived screening room on St. Mark’s Place run by several filmmakers on the scene), had a significant impact on both underground film, spawning the Cinema of Transgression (Beth B, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Tessa Hughes Freeland and others) and a new generation of independent filmmaking in New York (Jim Jarmusch, Tom DiCillo, Steve Buscemi, and Vincent Gallo).
Filmmakers associated with the movement included Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, John Lurie, and others.
In 2011, French filmmaker Céline Danhier made a documentary film entitled BLANK CITY. The film presents an oral history of No Wave Cinema through interviews with Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Steve Buscemi, Debbie Harry, Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore, Richard Kern, Jack Sargeant, Amos Poe, Susan Seidelman, Charlie Ahearn, and Nick Zedd. The soundtrack includes Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, James Chance and the Contortions, Bush Tetras, Sonic Youth and many more.
Famous quotes containing the words wave and/or cinema:
“Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave,
But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.
There may be little or much beyond the grave,
But the strong are saying nothing until they see.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema ... has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)