The Way It Is

Two New York poets talk about art, poetry, and smoke in this French New Wave inspired short.

A delusional man in a modern day city dresses, acts like, and has the mindset of a cowboy.

A film noirish atmosphere is created to show detective Lunch (a popular underground musician and poet) plow her way through the plans of a corporate businessman who seeks government defense contracts through real "corporate wars" and the manipulation of politicians.

Nan Goldin's slide show “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” converted, mixed and screened as a film by the artist, portraying the American underground culture, the no wave scene, post-Stonewall gay subculture, among others.

Complete strangers meet in a room to act out their sexual desires.

Two aimless psychics develop a strange relationship as they come to terms with having been groomed for espionage as children in the Gifted and Talented Education program.

Vincent Gallo as Flying Christ

A melancholic boy. Heavy images. Brightness and colors. Haunting in the form of sound and cuts. A curtain hides something behind it.

In this ostensible murder mystery, the genre elements are merely a pretext for the series of haunting (if inconclusive and only mildly erotic) homo-social encounters he stages. Starting with the familiar premise of the absent woman, so popular with Downtown filmmakers, Vogl drains his storytelling of any hints of noir stylization. Instead of nighttime scenes, slick streets, and dark alleys, he shoots documentary-style on the nondescript, sunlit streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and City Island in a manner that casually references the art-film angst of Michelangelo Antonioni.

With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure. — Charles Ruas

PBS produced documentary in two parts: the first is dedicated to saxophonist and composer John Zorn; the second is about Sonic Youth at the height of their powers in 1988.

A Nietzschian parable on the fate of innocence, THE TRAP DOOR follows the mishaps of Jeremy (John Ahearn) as he is fired by his boss (Jenny Holzer), gets laughed out of court by Judge Gary Indiana, loses his girlfriend to sleazy Richard Prince, is hustled by prospective employer (Bill Rice) and mauled by predatory bird-women. Finally, he seeks the help of a shrink (the legendary Jack Smith) who turns out to be the most demented of all.

In the void created ad hoc to throw us into desperation, fear, shock, the torment of an infinite present, Arto Lindsay sings with words, silences and small gestures of/with/for/about love, a force that is so violent that nothing will ever be the same again.

A young artist is followed by his friend in New York. A Tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat

A teen is locked in a room with a monitor lizard

Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern's first collaborative effort, The Right Side of My Brain, is a glimpse into the world of unsatiable female lust, narrated by Lydia Lunch. The film was initially dismissed and dismayed by critics such as J. Hoberman, but the criticism of The Right Side of My Brain received only pushed the two to go one step further with Fingered (1986).

The aftermath of an experience with Heroin causes a man to destroy anything within his path.

No-Wave film directed by Gordon Stevenson from Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. Mirielle Cervenka (Exene's sister) plays a young woman named Rose who is afflicted with a case of extreme stigmata.

This fascinating and retrospective look at the music of the outspoken and multitalented Lydia Lunch represents every stage of her varied career, with featured songs such as "I Woke Up Screaming" from her Teenage Jesus and the Jerks days. Other songs spanning the decades in this collection include "Freud in Flop," "Sorry for Behaving So Badly," "Dead River," "Solo Mystico," "Summon," "Violence Is the Sport of God" and many more.

John Zorn's live performance of Naked City's self-titled album at The Marquee Club in New York City, 1992.