YOU KILLED ME FIRST
The Cinema of Transgression
KW Institute of Contempporary Art
Auguststraße 69 - Berlin
19 February - 09 April 2012
In the 1980s a group of filmmakers emerged from the Lower East Side, New York, whose shared aims Nick Zedd later postulated in the Cinema of Transgression manifesto:
„We propose … that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. … We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. … There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.“
While the Reagan government mainly focused on counteracting the decline of traditional family values, the filmmakers went on a collision course with the conventions of American society by dealing with life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the low budget films, which were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. The films stridently analyze a reality of social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Although all the filmmakers of the Cinema of Transgression shared a belief in a radical form of moral and aesthetic transgression the films themselves emerged from an individual inner necessity; thus following a very personal visual sense and demonstratively subjective readings of various living conditions.
Even though the movement has remained largely unknown, the Cinema of Transgression has been a significant influence for later generations of artists.
YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is the first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression.
Program
Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 7.30 pm
Talk with Nick Zedd
Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 7.30 pm
Talk with Richard Kern
Saturday, March 10, 2012, 7.30 pm
Llik your idols, documentary about the Cinema of Transgression by Angélique Bosio
France 2007, 70 min., OV
Film screening in the presence of the director
Thursday, March 15, 2012, 7.30 pm
Lydia Lunch reads from her novel Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary
Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7.30 pm
Talk with Tessa Hughes-Freeland
The Cinema of Transgression
KW Institute of Contempporary Art
Auguststraße 69 - Berlin
19 February - 09 April 2012
In the 1980s a group of filmmakers emerged from the Lower East Side, New York, whose shared aims Nick Zedd later postulated in the Cinema of Transgression manifesto:
„We propose … that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. … We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. … There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.“
While the Reagan government mainly focused on counteracting the decline of traditional family values, the filmmakers went on a collision course with the conventions of American society by dealing with life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the low budget films, which were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. The films stridently analyze a reality of social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Although all the filmmakers of the Cinema of Transgression shared a belief in a radical form of moral and aesthetic transgression the films themselves emerged from an individual inner necessity; thus following a very personal visual sense and demonstratively subjective readings of various living conditions.
Even though the movement has remained largely unknown, the Cinema of Transgression has been a significant influence for later generations of artists.
YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is the first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression.
Program
Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 7.30 pm
Talk with Nick Zedd
Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 7.30 pm
Talk with Richard Kern
Saturday, March 10, 2012, 7.30 pm
Llik your idols, documentary about the Cinema of Transgression by Angélique Bosio
France 2007, 70 min., OV
Film screening in the presence of the director
Thursday, March 15, 2012, 7.30 pm
Lydia Lunch reads from her novel Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary
Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7.30 pm
Talk with Tessa Hughes-Freeland
