Week 9 (Aug 16 – 22) – Cinema of Transgression: “none shall emerge unscathed” -Nick Zedd
The film follows Max Menace (Eric Mitchell, a foundational figure of the No Wave cinema movement), a mysterious, bleached-blond European secret agent who touches down in New York City wearing a sharp white suit and black tie for a job that no one will verify. Checking into a room at the historic Chelsea Hotel, Max finds himself adrift in an overwhelmingly vertical, labyrinthine metropolis. As he waits aimlessly for a rendezvous contact that never seems to materialize, he is relentlessly tailed, stalked and assaulted by a rotating cast of enigmatic thugs, random strangers and femme fatales. Navigating the leather bars of the West Village, the shadowy lofts of SoHo and the downtown pavement, Max’s existential wandering ultimately culminates in a frantic foot chase through the concrete canyons of lower Manhattan, leading to a fateful encounter near the shadow of the World Trade Center and Battery Park.
Sure, it makes no sense, but you can meet all kinds of interesting people, from Debbie Harry singing Kurt Weill as an alley-living mystery woman to Patti Astor (a prominent downtown actress and fixture of the No Wave and early hip-hop scenes) and Anya Phillips (a pivotal architect of the New York No Wave scene who was famed as a manager, designer and fixture of CBGB and Club 57). The Cramps even show up to play Iggy and Bowie’s “Funtime.”
Directed, written and produced by underground auteur Amos Poe, The Foreigner stands as a defining artifact of the No Wave cinema movement, deliberately rejecting traditional Hollywood structures in favor of a nihilistic, post-punk aesthetic heavily indebted to Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave and Andy Warhol’s minimalist underground experiments. Shot entirely on location, the movie captures a gritty, pre-gentrified New York City, featuring hauntingly stark, upward-angle compositions of the newly constructed World Trade Center towers and empty temporary beachfronts on the site where Battery Park City would eventually rise.
You can watch this on Tubi.
