Cinema of Transgression

The Cinema of Transgression (CoT) was born in the mid-1980s in New York. It was the ‘second underground’ film movement. The film-makers (e.g. Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Linda Lunch, etc.) who developed this movement were drawn from the chaotic and confused nihilistic lifestyles that defined their lives. In an attempt to find an expressive alternative to their deep sense of injustice and repulsion towards society at large they turned towards a wholly self-obsessed and cynical style of working. They even declared themselves ‘at war’ with the established alternative of the avant-garde.
The CoT filmmakers turned towards the ‘first’ New York underground of the 1960s with one film as their quintessential reference: Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith. Flaming Creatures was, perhaps, the most persecuted of all the films to ever come out of the ‘underground’. It was confiscated and burned many times over and became the subject of major legal battles. It drew as its source of imagery the then (1963) transgressive idolisation of ‘cheap’ glamour and turned the Hollywood romance into a ‘camp’ characterisation of its sexuality. It placed these references into what appeared to be an anarchistic, yet totally personal and self-obsessed style of film-making. The CoT film-makers took the same kind of route for their film-making and turned to their own personal world – a world of ‘trash’ and ‘sleaze’ – a world that was framed by drugs, sex and disillusionment. Their imagery drew upon the sensationalist elements of hardcore pornography, SM, Bondage and horror to represent the extremes of behaviour in an almost wilful descent into an abyss. The films of CoT seem to document the cause and effect of one’s self-determined decline – and abusive interpersonal relationships – while expressing their contempt for the ‘mindless complacency’ and absence of feeling that surrounded them.

Stephen Dwoskin