CINEMA OF TRANSGRESSION

Published by Erik

The term Cinema of Transgression was coined by Nick Zedd in 1985, describing the work of a group of people that lived in the, at that time,violently and drug infested Lower East Side of New York. They were filming super low budget movies with 8mm cameras full of sex and violence to shock the audience but there was also always a sense of subtle humor.

Nick Zedd postulated in the Cinema of Transgression manifesto: „We propose … that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. … We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. … There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes o which no one has yet imagined.“While the Reagan government mainly focused on counteracting the decline of traditiona family values, the filmmakers went on a collision course with the conventions of American society by dealing with life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the low budget films, which were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witnessto an extraordinary radicality. The films stridently analyze a reality of social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Although all the filmmakers of the Cinema of Transgression shared a belief in a radical form of moral and aesthetic transgression the films themselves emerged from an individual inner necessity; thus following a very personal visual sense and demonstratively subjective readings of various living realities. Even though the movement has remained largely unknown, the Cinema of Transgression has been a significant influence for later generations of artists.
 

ATTENTION: Contains explicit material, not for the faint of heart>

“Basically, in one sentence, give us the definition of the ‚Cinema of Transgression’.”  Nick Zedd: “Fuck you.”

KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Auguststraße 69. 10117 Berlin
Till April 9th. Tue - Sun 12 - 19 h. Thur 12 – 21 h
Furthermore:
21.02.2012, 19.30 Talk with Nick Zedd
22.02.2012, 19.30 Talk with Richard Kern