First 80s indie film fest shows movies that paved the way for the indie boom
The decade’s underground film offering rarely gets its dues but at a new festival Jarmusch and Lynch sit next to under appreciated gems like Heat and Sunlight
It started with a conversation about Hollywood Shuffle.
Nellie Killian, programmer at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek, and Jake Perlin, director of Artists Public Domain’s Cinema Conservancy, were discussing Robert Townsend’s 1987 independent comedy born from the frustration of being a black actor unable to find good roles. “The trailer actually has him holding up his credit cards,” they both enthusiastically recalled, and this captured the essence of what the massive 60+ film, six-week series kicking off on 17 July at BAM is all about. “Was this put on the director’s credit card?” was the litmus test they asked one another when deciding which titles to include in indie 80s. The question may not have been literal, but the spirit is easy to recognize.
“Everyone knows what a 70s movie is, and same goes for the 90s independent boom. Pinning down what makes an 80s indie isn’t so easy,” Killian tells me. As such, there are essentially three programming tiers. The top level are the obvious choices. Well, obvious to cinephiles. But to those too young to remember, or perhaps just beginning a relationship with movies outside the mainstream, here is an opportunity to check some essentials off the list. Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It all make an appearance.
Then there’s the second tier. The films that most movie buffs know about, and maybe have seen, but likely not projected at a state-of-the-art facility like BAM. “It really did begin with ‘I want to see Hollywood Shuffle in a theater’” Killian confesses. As such, that’s the one that kicks off the series, and others in this group include Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, Bruce Weber’s Let’s Get Lost, Ulli Lomel’s Blank Generation, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Poto and Cabengo, Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing, Wendell B Harris’s Chameleon Street and David Burton Morris’s Patti Rocks.
Prior to sex, lies, and videotape the idea was to go and have your film seen. Afterwards, it was to get your film sold
The titles with more recognition subsidize, in a way, a third tier, a slew of films culled from deep archives, oftentimes surprising film-makers themselves. (More than one director was surprised that Cinema Conservancy was able to find prints of some of their movies.) Nellie Killian can’t wait to expose audiences to a type of independent film-making that perhaps doesn’t exist anymore. “What’s so exciting about 80s indie is that there is no one film that perfectly captures it. There are punk films, regional subculture films, low-budget horror. Nothing is cohesive.” Many of these movies, like Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, were big winners at Sundance, but before the watershed year of 1989.
Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which is included in the series, changed everything. “Prior to sex, lies and videotape,” Perlin explained, “the idea was to go and have your film seen. Afterwards, it was to get your film sold.”
The term “Sundance movie” means something now, but before 1989, it could have meant anything. “Look at Heat and Sunlight,” Perlin suggests. The winner just one year before Soderbergh’s success is one of the most obscure entries and better gems in the series. Shot on black and white video and transferred to film, Heat and Sunlight is a meditation on a San Francisco-based photographer dealing with war flashbacks, a bad relationship and surviving the art scene.
“It’s one of our regional films,” Killian boasts. It was directed by and starred Rob Nilsson, an underground figure with an enormous résumé waiting for rediscovery. Killian compares Heat and Sunlight with some of the other obscure, regional titles, ranging from Jessie Maple’s Will, set in Harlem, to Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s Seventeen, shot in Muncie, Indiana, to Jacob Burckhardt’s Landlord Blues, direct from New York’s extremely pre-gentrified East Village. It’s a remarkable way to examine subcultures.
Perhaps most exciting is divining the 90s indie explosion’s roots from some of these picks. “There’s nothing more deadpan, more shaggy than Chan is Missing,” Perlin says. “It’s as important as Jarmusch. I don’t think you can even have Jarmusch without that film.” He also agrees that the guy-talk-heavy road trip Patti Rocks is a likely influence on Kevin Smith’s Clerks. Killian cites Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge as a prototypical smart teen genre felt in just about everything that followed. McElwee’s Sherman’s March, which began as a typical grant-funded historical documentary, became a first-personcri de coeur about love, inspiring a host of confessional essay docs.
There are a number of films in the series from directors whose careers never quite took off. The brilliant Chameleon Street, loosely based on an actual con artist who posed as, among other things, a surgeon, is one such title. “For every Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape there are so many Wendell Harris’s Chameleon Streets,” Killian says. “It’s not that they were bad film-makers, they weren’t easily commodifiable.” That specificity may be part of the reason there’s never been a large scale retrospective of 80s indies before, and why these forthcoming weeks are so exciting.
- Indie 80s starts 17 July at BAMcinématek to 27 August