The Blank Generation preceded by Stiletto

Director: Amos Poe, Melvie Arslanian, Ivan Král

1981 / 103min / DCP

Made in collaboration with Poe’s colleague at his New Line Cinema day job, Ivan Král of the Patti Smith Group, The Blank Generation is a one-of-a-kind document of NYC punk at ground zero, capturing early live performances by Smith, Television, Blondie, The Ramones, a pre-Voidoids Richard Hell, a pre-Sire-signing Talking Heads and, offering a rousing rendition of The Barbarians “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?”, transgender shit-kicker Jayne County. Assembled in a single amphetamine-fueled editing session at the Maysles brothers’ editing studio, the result was the genesis of what would be dubbed No Wave Cinema, a rough-edged, rowdy piece of work that lit a fuse under the East Village film scene. Preceded by the dreamlike No Wave odyssey Stiletto—in which Poe appears as a performer, in a cast of downtown notables including author Gary Indiana and artist Joseph Kosuth—as a young woman, Nadja (played by multi-hyphenate “Queen of the Mudd Club” Tina L’Hotsky), plunges into the lower depths of Fun City–era Manhattan on a search for her sister’s murderer, a mission that will involve a total subversion of the staple elements of the classic whodunit.

Stiletto (dir. Melvie Arslanian, 1981, 48 mins)

The Blank Generation (dir. Ivan Král, 1976, 55 mins)

Part of Amos Poe and No Wave Cinema