Arts Bombast: No Wave Film
Gallery 98 just opened an online exhibition of photographs, posters, and other ephemera from No Wave film. The exhibition features rare materials from the films of Amos Poe, Beth B and Scott B, and Charlie Ahearn. Everything is as gritty, sexy, and violent as you’d hope.
What more can I say? Check out the images below, and if you have an extra $110 lying around, please please buy me the photo of Anya Phillips, k?
[Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, & Adele Bertei in Scott B & Beth B’s The Offenders, copyright 1979 B Photo.]
[Richard Kern (photographer), David Wajnarowicz in Manhattan Love Suicides, 1985.]
[Charlie Ahearn’s the Deadly Art of Survival” photo Habib Mostefaoni]
[Promotional postcard, “Ecstatic Stigmatic, A Film by Gordon Stevenson; Cinematography by Johanna Heer; Arto Lindsay with Johnny O’Kane, Brenda Bergman, Anita Paltrinieri; Mary Kathryn Cervenka as Little Rose,” 1980.]
[Anya Phillips, The Foreigner-1977: Natalici.]
[Adele Bertie & John Lurie in Scott B & Beth B’s The Offenders, copyright 1979 B Photo.]
[Martha Cooper (photographer), “Patti Astor and Crazy Legs in WILDSTYLE, 1982.]
[Duncan Hannah and Amos Poe, 1976, Unmade Beds Film Shoot, Natalici.]
[Debbie Harry-The Foreigner, 1977, Natalici]
Want more No Wave film? Read my reviews on BLANK CITY and Llik Your Idols.
Ribbon Around A Bomb 
Hmm, that photo of Anya Philips is rather nice.
Nancy Arlen presents quite a stark presense in my opinion.I would loved to have seen her reductive personage in the cinematic form evident in the film stills here.Having never seen films representative of No Wave cinema,i’m no expert critic of this artform,nor have I studied film.Yet in instances that I see films,primarily in black and white,I feel compelled to absorb the moods and meanings which the artists leave open for interpretation.Lydia Lunch always has an impact on me.In media pieces,I find her ascerbic allure intoxicating.and can imagine the symbolic significance of her moniker “baby faced killer”.Visually,not every photo captures the most flattering side of a dynamic persona,but Anya Phillips does strike an erotically charged pose.Street life for me back in the autumn/winter of ’81 was a bittersweet hell,but I almost witnessed Lydia Lunch in “Vortex”.I was without funds,but a shelter fatality on the Ward Island complex when snatching up visually potent affirmations of No Wave existance.No wave was a scene that drew me in its inception,and I enjoy hearing of its history and further developement.Amos Poe and Glen Branca are always informative speakers who I listen to for accounts of what the movement meant.