Outtakes from a movement that shocked the city
The Cinema of Transgression (COT) was an underground film movement, allied with the No Wave scene, that roiled downtown New York City in the 80s and 90s. A loose arrangement of filmmakers and actors were self-consciously grouped under the banner of the COT by founder Nick Zedd, who penned the movement's manifesto in 1985. The main practitioners of the COT often collaborated and made many short films and a few feature-lengths. The COT's major themes include: the link between sex and death, violent sex and voyeurism, the unbearable boredom of square American life, state repression, the lure of madness, the psychosis of families, body mutilation, all-encompassing nihilism. The content (explicit, extreme) and the style (gritty, handshot, usually on Super 8 or 16mm film) were opposed to both formulaic Hollywood and the academic, structuralist avant-garde. The films were shot on low or no budgets, with handmade sets, untrained actors, and small crews.
COT leaves behind a thorny, hard-to-process, and haunting body of work that is rarely screened today, and probably sleeping in various archives. This pictures collection aims to visibilize the silent, graphic, and picturesque side of the COT's residue. The only criteria for inclusion in this collection is that an image depicts the movement and is still. No videos will be found here. Many of the COT's filmmakers (like Richard Kern) were just as much photographers, and they took iconic pictures during their shoots. Some of these images, like those of Lung Leg in "Fingered", can seem to capture the whole movie, in their eerie emotiveness and wide-eyed horror. Other images look behind the scenes into how these strange movies were made. There is also a page collecting printed matter relating to COT, like flyers and bulletins, and another with portraits of the major players, like Lydia Lunch and Tessa Hughes-Freedland. Together, I offer these poisoned eye-candies as a sickly reminder of what artists are capable of when they fear no taboo and obey no limit.
