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:
““Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)