This film is like a zine — black and white, brutal and unpredictable. Ropy and cutting, produced on a tiny budget of 5000 dollars. It is created on a veteran-xerox, roughly cut and edited. The film gives a sense of underground, murky basement. These all underline the essence of a counter-cultural revolution that is an extreme slamming of
The Foreigner. Xerox-made film
BY EUGEN RAULDI
widely accepted art form. The form is reduced to a nonsense for it to die and reborn, reach point zero and start a new cycle. The film’s director, Amos Poe, as one of ‘the indie cinema pioneers’ and creators of a nihilistic phenomenon of ‘no
wave’, successfully implements its principles in film-making. Logic is elusive, actions vague, conversations confusing. Understanding is replaced with sensing.
Watching the film is like a diving session into 1970s underground New York: punk-parties, latex women, gays, other low profilers. Black and white New York City is indifferent and hostile to the foreigner, who came there with a mission but got lost in the gravitational field of Manhatten. New York in 1977 is a special time and place. Filth, graffiti and criminal gangs became the city traits. City council was on a brink of declaring the city a bankrupt. This apocalyptic scenery gives a birth to a new protest against broken capitalism and commercial discourse in culture. Confronting traditional aesthetic was, in fact, contesting a social system as a whole. New York was open, free and desperate. Lower East Side was drunk and flirting.
Impyoon March 2018 #1
ILLUSTRATION IS BASED ON THE ORIGINAL FILM POSTER, 1978
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