Really enjoyed Celine Danhier’s documentary “Blank City,” an attempt to chronicle and contextualize the New York independent film scene/punk film scene of the early 1980s.

Often when I go to New York these days it seems like it’s a city full of Starbucks coffeehouses and Duane Reade drugstores on every corner; it seems to have lost most of that edginess – or at least surprise – we’ve come to hope to expect.

In the NYC of “Blank City,” that current New York of Giuliani-Bloomberg and Wall Street is nowhere to be found. Danhier’s film applies the context necessary to understand this explosion of the avant-garde and how it was possible: the near bankruptcy of the city in the 1970s; the collapsing infrastructure of certain neighborhoods, notably the East Village; the anarchy that arises when an underground economy (along with the drug trade) takes over the streets.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/qjzRPRBQngo[/youtube]

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These days when the relentless consumerist march is to commodify absolutely everything, the stories of the films these people managed to make on next to nothing are pretty spectacular – especially when you stop and realize this was in the days long before digital, when there were no cell phones that doubled as video cameras and there was no YouTube or iMovie or countless other technologies (including crowdfunding!) that we take for granted now.

This film and these factors immediately reminded me of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the artistic scene we’re seeing there – a certain lawlessness and destruction, combined with the ability to live very cheaply, opens up all manner of channels for artistic expression – for those young enough (or young-at-heart enough) and smart enough to take advantage of a fertile, and hopeful, situation.

NYC’s Independent Feature Project