Lung Leg (born Elisabeth Carr; July 8, 1963, in Minneapolis, Minnesota) 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.
Lung Leg appeared in several Richard Kern films, notably starring in one of his longest features, the 1985 film You Killed Me First, as well as appearing in Worm Movie (1985) and Fingered (1986). She also appeared in two music videos directed by Kern, "Concubine" (1984) by Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69" (1985).
After her film career in the 1980s, Lung Leg left the public sphere for several years. Nick Zedd wrote in his autobiography, Totem of the Depraved , that she relocated to Minneapolis, before moving back to New York City after a short romance with German musician Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
She resumed her film career in 2005, appearing in the Mike Etoll film Sewer Baby. In it, she played a bartender dealing with Tiny Tim, various monsters, special effects and a primordial dwarf. In 2011, Lung Leg appeared in The Hagstone Demon , a film directed by Jon Springer. [1]
In 2010, Lung Leg appeared in the documentary Blank City featuring interviews with participants in the no wave cinema and transgressive cinema movements. [2]
There are few known interviews with her; one appeared in issue No. 12 of Film Threat magazine (1987), and another, by Duane Davis, appeared in the book, Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression (1995), edited by Jack Sargent. [3] An excerpt of a now lost video interview of her appears in IDN4 (1991).
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene which emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Nastassja Aglaia Kinski is a German actress and former model who has appeared in more than 60 films in Europe and the United States. Her worldwide breakthrough was with Stay as You Are (1978). She then came to global prominence with her Golden Globe Award-winning performance as the title character in the Roman Polanski-directed film Tess (1979). Other films in which she acted include the Francis Ford Coppola musicial romance film One from the Heart (1982), erotic horror film Cat People (1982) from Paul Schrader and the Wim Wenders drama films Paris, Texas (1984) and Faraway, So Close! (1993). She also appeared in the biographical drama film An American Rhapsody (2001). She is the daughter of German actor Klaus Kinski.
Rachael Leigh Cook is an American actress and model. She has starred in the films The Baby-Sitters Club (1995), She's All That (1999), and Josie and the Pussycats (2001), and in the television series Into the West and Perception. She is also the voice behind various characters in Robot Chicken and Tifa Lockhart in the Final Fantasy series, starting with the English version of the film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
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.
Ann Miller was an American actress and dancer. She is best remembered for her work in the classical Hollywood cinema musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Her early film work included roles in Room Service, starring the Marx Brothers and Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You, both released in 1938. She later starred in the musical classics Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate (1953). Her final film role was in Mulholland Drive (2001).
Lacey Nicole Chabert is an American actress. One of her first roles was playing Bianca Montgomery, the daughter of Erica Kane, on All My Children, from 1992 until 1993. She then gained further prominence as a child actress for her role as Claudia Salinger in the Fox television drama Party of Five (1994–2000).
Lydia Lunch is an American singer, poet, writer, actress and self-empowerment speaker. Her career began during the 1970s New York City no wave scene as the singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
Transgressive art is art that aims to outrage or violate basic morals and sensibilities. 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.
EVOL is the third full-length studio album by the American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. Released in May 1986, EVOL was Sonic Youth’s first album on SST Records, and also the first album to feature then-new drummer Steve Shelley who had just replaced Bob Bert.
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.
The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City–based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of artists using shock value and black humor in their films. Key players in this movement were Zedd, Kembra Pfahler, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Tommy Turner, Jon Moritsugu, Manuel DeLanda, David Wojnarowicz, Richard Kern, and Lydia Lunch, who in the late 1970s and mid-1980s began to make very low-budget films using cheap 8 mm cameras.
Kembra Pfahler is an American filmmaker, performance artist, visual artist, rock musician, and film actress.
Lina Romay, a.k.a. Candy Coster and Lulu Laverne, was a Spanish actress who often appeared in films directed by her long-time companion Jesús Franco. She appeared in approximately 109 Jesus Franco films made over 30 years.
Jon Springer is an American independent filmmaker whose science fiction and horror films combine explicit imagery with religious subtext.
Suzushi Hanayagi,, was a Japanese dancer and choreographer. Born in Osaka, Japan, she found her way in the international art world through her Japanese classical dance theater forms and experimental performance art forms. For more than 50 years she actively performed, taught and choreographed in classic Japanese dance forms and contemporary collaborative multimedia performance works. She appeared in Japan, the United States and Europe as a choreographer. She collaborated on many of famed director and designer Robert Wilson’s most revered works created during the years 1984 through 1999.
The Hagstone Demon is a 2009 American supernatural horror film directed, co-written, co-produced, photographed, and edited by Jon Springer. The film stars Mark Borchardt as an alcoholic writer and caretaker plagued by demonic forces, with Nadine Gross, Cyndi Kurtz, Sasha Andreev, and Lung Leg in supporting roles. It was shot mostly in black-and-white.
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.
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.
Visage is a 2020 independent psychological horror video game developed and published by SadSquare Studio. Set in a strangely structured house with a somber history, players control Dwayne Anderson as he explores the backstories of the inhabitants that once lived there. The game is presented in first-person perspective, and a large portion of the house is accessible, although some areas require keys. Obstacles include avoiding the dark to reduce loss of sanity, though several tools can aid players through the dark.