Richard Kern is an American underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to prominence as part of the cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered, which featured personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence and perversion and was involved in the Cinema of Transgression movement, a term coined by Nick Zedd.
Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian cannibal film directed by Ruggero Deodato and written by Gianfranco Clerici. It stars Robert Kerman as Harold Monroe, an anthropologist who leads a rescue team into the Amazon rainforest to locate a crew of filmmakers that have gone missing while filming a documentary on local cannibal tribes.
Transgressive art is art that aims to outrage or cause a reaction from the observer. The term transgressive was first used in this sense by American filmmaker Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression in 1985. Zedd used it to describe his legacy with underground film-makers like Paul Morrissey, John Waters, and Kenneth Anger, and the relationship they shared with Zedd and his New York City peers in the early 1980s.
Nick Zedd was an American filmmaker, author, and painter based in Mexico City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work. These filmmakers and artistic collaborators included Richard Kern, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Lung Leg, Kembra Pfahler, and Lydia Lunch. Under numerous pen names, Zedd edited and wrote the Underground Film Bulletin (1984–1990) which publicized the work of these filmmakers. The Cinema of Transgression was explored in Jack Sargeant's book Deathtripping.
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Lung Leg is an American pin-up girl and actress perhaps best known for appearing on the cover of the Sonic Youth album EVOL. During the 1980s, she gained fame as a model and star of films made by the transgressive movement.
No wave cinema was an underground filmmaking movement that flourished on the Lower East Side of New York City from about 1976 to 1985. Associated with the artists’ group Collaborative Projects, no wave cinema was a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized dark edgy mood and unrehearsed immediacy above many other artistic concerns – similar to the parallel no wave music movement in its raw and rapid style.
Udo Kierspe, known professionally as Udo Kier, is a German actor. Known primarily as a character actor, he has appeared in more than 220 films in both leading and supporting roles throughout Europe and the Americas. He has collaborated with acclaimed filmmakers such as Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Walerian Borowczyk, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Dario Argento, Tom Shadyac, Charles Matton, Guy Maddin, Alexander Payne, and Paul Morrissey.
Revelation Perth International Film Festival began in 1997. Founded by Richard Sowada to showcase a large range of independent feature films, documentaries, short films, and experimental works, it runs every July in Perth, Western Australia and is regarded as one of the best independent film festivals in Australia.
The Creation Cinema series from Creation Books is a collection of books dealing with film history and pop culture.
Meat Is Murder: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture is a book originally published in 1998, which examines cannibalism in myth, true crime, and film.
The Hamilton Underground Film Festival was an annual film festival held in Hamilton, New Zealand between 2006 and 2013. Run on the basis of a DIY ethos the festival was open to all and had no admission fee for film entries. Each entrant received a DVD which contains all the entered films. The festival was the longest running festival of its kind in Australasia until recent usurped by the Melbourne underground film festival.
Naked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008. The book also features contributions from Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Stephanie Watson, and Arthur and Corrine Cantrill.
First published as Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression by Creation Books in 1995 and subsequently republished as Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground by Soft Skull Press, Deathtripping is a book by Jack Sargeant which examines the New York based, post-punk underground film movement known as the Cinema of Transgression that formed around the manifesto written by underground filmmaker Nick Zedd. The loose-knit group of underground filmmakers included Richard Kern, Tommy Turner, Lydia Lunch, Beth B, Cassandra Stark, Joe Coleman and David Wojnarowicz, amongst others.
Beverly Grant was an actress and filmmaker who appeared in films by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Gregory Markopoulos, Ira Cohen, Ron Rice, and Stephen Dwoskin, on the off-off Broadway stage in works by Ronald Tavel and LeRoi Jones, as well as collaborated with her one-time husband, experimental filmmaker and musician, Tony Conrad. Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker of Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, in which Grant appeared, called her "the queen of the underground – both undergrounds."
Tessa Hughes-Freeland is a British-born experimental film maker, writer living in New York City. Her films have screened internationally in North America, Europe and Australia and in prominent museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. She has collaborated on live multi-media projects with musicians like John Zorn and J. G. Thirlwell. She and Ela Troyano co-founded the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984 and served as its co-directors until 1990. Hughes-Freeland later served as President of the Board of Directors of the Film-Makers Co-Operative in New York City from 1998-2001. She has published articles in numerous books, including “Naked Lens: Beat Cinema” and “No Focus: Punk Film,” and in periodicals including PAPER Magazine, Filmmaker magazine, GQ, the East Village Eye, and Film Threat.
Thomas Waugh is a Canadian critic, lecturer, author, actor, and activist, best known for his extensive work on documentary film and eroticism in the history of LGBT cinema and art. A professor emeritus at Concordia University, he taught 41 years in the film studies program of the School of Cinema and held a research chair in documentary film and sexual representation. He was also the director of the Concordia HIV/AIDS Project, 1993-2017, a program providing a platform for research and conversations involving HIV/AIDS in the Montréal area.
Jack Natz is an American bass guitarist and vocalist best known as the original bassist of The Undead and a member of the noise rock group Cop Shoot Cop. He has also acted in independent cinema, such as in the 1987 film Submit to Me Now. In 2003, he joined Lubricated Goat, led by musician and composer Stu Spasm, and recorded and toured with them. He lives in Brooklyn, with his attention focused on creating collages, paintings and found object sculptures.
Yony Leyser is a director and writer based in Berlin.
