THRUST IN ME
Nick Zedd, author of the Cinema of Transgression manifesto, plays both a disaffected young man and his suicidal girlfriend in this nihilistic rejection of romantic love. Zedd described this collaboration with Kern as a perfect match, stating that Kern would “pretty much go along with any of my ideas, especially the more dirty and deranged and perverted”. – Jack Sargeant, Deathtripping
United States 1984 / 8:00 / Director: Richard Kern
SIMONLAND
One of the more overtly political offerings of the movement, Tommy Turner’s absurdist collaboration with Richard Kern satirises the hypnotic power of television. A grotesque demagogue leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says, with twisted results.
United States 1984 / 12:00 / Director: Tommy Turner
DEAD ON MY ARM
Intensely personal, Stark Mele’s first film is a chilling evocation of her internment in a mental institution during her adolescence. The non-narrative essayistic approach combines Catholic iconography with images of the occult and the abjection of the female body. Stark Mele was later to reject the Cinema of Transgression for what she saw as its conformity, arguing that it had become “too rigidly defined… its self-imposed aesthetics increasingly demanded aggression, violence and pornography.”
United States 1985 / 6:00 / Director: Casandra Stark Mele
STRAY DOGS
An obsessive young man is driven to extremes to win the attention of a successful painter. Both parts are played by significant figures in the New York art scene, Bill Rice and David Wojnarowicz, who was to succumb to AIDS in 1992. David Wojnarowicz acts with his entire body clenching and unclenching, and his facial expressions convey an exaggeration of frustrated intensity… a cross between Buster Keaton and Ed Gein. – Jack Sargeant, Deathtripping
United States 1984 / 10:00 / Director: Richard Kern
POLICE STATE
One of the most narratively coherent works of the movement, “Police State” is a blackly comic portrayal of mindless police brutality. A young man, played by Zedd, is arrested on a trumped up charge and subjected to a series of psychological humiliations and physical beatings. The film also tackles racial division within the police force. Proposing that the NYPD has lost any sense of accountability to the public it is supposed to serve, the film offers a critique that transcends the self-regarding shock-value of much of the Cinema of Transgression.
United States 1987 / 18:00 / Director: Nick Zedd
NYMPHOMANIA
Although this work was made much later than the other films included here, British filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland was active on the New York underground scene from the early 1980s. Collaborating with ballerina Holly Adams, Hughes-Freeland draws on a classical aesthetic which renders the film’s transgression all the more shocking. Nymphomania locates a sexual mythology specific to Western culture and deconstructs it via a depiction of its inherent power relationships and by pursuing this trajectory to its logical conclusion. – Jack Sargeant, Deathtripping
United States 1994 / 9:00 /
Director: Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Holly Adams
WHOREGASM
An intoxicating expanded cinema experience comprising two overlapping 16mm projections, Whoregasm combines outtakes from Police State with found material, pornographic films and Zedd’s own footage featuring himself in drag alongside Susan Manson. The film proposes contrasting visions of sex and sexuality as mechanistic and repressive or as an act of rebellion, a brief return to the possibilities of chaos beyond the guilt-ridden taboos of contemporary America. – Jack Sargeant, Deathtripping
United States 1988 / 12:00 / Director: Nick Zedd