The Cinema of Transgression
1979-1993
“If it’s not transgressive, it’s not underground. It has to be threatening the status quo by doing something surprising, not just imitating what’s been done before.” - New York City’s Lower East Side in the early Eighties saw an explosion of the downtown film scene, as a variety of film-makers, photographers, performers and artists, inspired by the post-punk No Wave music scene, began to explore new, direct, and confrontational cinematic forms. In 1984 the manifesto for the Cinema of Transgression was announced, a movement looking to transform values by breaking all taboos of cinematic expression, conservative religion, politics and aesthetics. We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade. We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the sco…
Films