Acting
A punk savage satire about a kidnapping.
Filmed at CBGB’s, New York City at a Teenage Jesus & The Jerks concert on January 13th, 1978. The film shows the band members’ heads in slow motion over a live concert soundtrack.
The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into.
My Lover the Killer is the former title of the album by Lydia Lunch & Marc Hurtado released in 2016. The music, first languorous then abrasive, accompanies the verbal flow of the transgressive poetess who comes back to an intimate and violently tragic episode of her own life: her love and death story with Johnny O’Kane. With her long-time collaborator, Lydia Lunch, face to face with the camera, transforms this naked scene full of troubled anger into a deep dark confession. Hurtado’s images are saturated, grainy, willingly experimental and clash with those of an archive of furious performances. Just like the one who seeks to avoid taking part in her own prophecy.
Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites including Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace. The latter location required ingenuity: Posing as potential renters, Nares and associates asked the manager to show them the apartment, then unlocked the windows on the way out; a few hours later, they broke back into the space, full cast and crew in tow, to shoot the necessary scenes.
Based on the true story of four Nazi saboteurs who infiltrated the US in 1942 and were quickly caught and executed, this 80-minute ode to America's irresistibly corruptive allure was the only underground feature by writer-director Anders Grafstrom. A Swedish art director who relocated to NYC, he created this grandiose No-Wave, Super-8 color-epic at the age of 23, only to die in a Mexican car accident a few months after completing the film.
