In early ’80s NYC, No Wave cinema caught a fast break - then crashed. Can it rise again?

Plus: RIP BELA TARR

Jan 09, 2026

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“It’s defined by what it isn’t. What is it? I don’t fuckin’ know.”

- Lydia Lunch on No Wave

At 3:33 p.m. on Christmas Day, the lamp blew, and Amos Poe’s screen went black. Dead at 76, the underground filmmaker leaves behind his wife, daughter, and the vestiges of the gritty, zitty, dourly menacing cinema movement he sired in New York half a century ago.

In 1976, the City was skidding toward financial collapse. Entire downtown blocks lay scorched and abandoned. From these ashes sprang No Wave, a para-punk pileup of musicians, painters, and filmmakers who rejected Hollywood frameworks and the avant-garde’s academic pieties in favor of loose, godless primitivism.

The Village had long served as the hellmouth of American underground cinema. In the Sixties, there was Jack Smith, the Kuchar brothers, and Andy Warhol’s Factory. John Cassavetes preceded them. There was Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, and Shirley Clarke. Even further back, some of the first-ever filmmakers shot guerrilla-style one-reelers like East Side Urchins Bathing in a Fountain (1903) at the behest of the peephole impresario of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison.

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The Blank Generation (1976), the jagged home video of a concert doc Amos Poe co-directed with Ivan Kral, is considered the first No Wave film. Featuring performances by Blondie, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Television, the Talking Heads and more, it announced the new aesthetic (dis)order. To edit the film, Poe scraped together forty dollars, rented the Maysles Brothers’ editing room for a single day, locked himself inside with a bag of speed, and emerged twenty-four hours later with a finished film, which he premiered at CBGB’s. The packed house was boisterous.

“There was a feeling of reaching the end of some kind of cycle, and we really felt we were doing something different and new,” said James Nares, whose Rome ‘78 - a bedsheet historical drama about the life of Caligula, filmed at night while illegally breaking into neoclassical buildings - is considered another seminal artifact. The sudden abundance of sync-sound super-8 cameras widened the circle: Vivienne Dick, Lizzie Borden, Scott and Beth B, John Lurie, and a young Jim Jarmusch all followed.

*Permanent Vacation* (1980, dir. Jim Jarmusch)

“The Lower East Side was like a film studio. There was no money, and no one was running it, but there was the talent pool of personalities.” - Glenn O’Brien

J. Hoberman coined the “No Wave” label in the Village Voice, describing a movement “shot through with fantasies of punishment and revenge.” Like the provocations of Kenneth Anger and the transgressive camp of John Waters, No Wave skewered mass cultural forms while exalting la vie Bohème.

“Violence triumphs over sex as a libidinal spectacle,” Hoberman observed, “And when sex does break through it’s apt to be more sadomasochistic than polymorphously perverse.” In 1978, there were 1,504 murders in New York City, and filmmakers occupied some of the most dangerous neighborhoods. Sometimes, they invited local residents to collaborate on stories that riffed on the pervasive violence. Charlie Ahearn’s The Deadly Art of Survival, a bare-bones Enter the Dragon, was filmed in the Smith housing-projects.

The Deadly Art of Survival, Charlie Ahearn (1979)

“If you had an idea, you just did it, you made it happen - and you did it on no money. There were no rules, and that’s what was wonderful about being in downtown New York at that time. For me it was a land of yes.” - Ann Magnuson

The scene remained small - perhaps three hundred artists - interlinked across films, bands, and micro-cinemas like the New Cinema on St. Mark’s Place. “There really was an explosion - not only in film, but in music, theater, and performance,” said Steve Buscemi, who made his feature film debut with Vincent Gallo in Eric Mitchell’s The Way It Is (1985).

The St. Marks, a lost East Village theater Source

The breakout success of No Wave films like Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (the first American indie accepted to Cannes) and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (a Camera d’Or-winning box office hit) brought global attention to the movement - and with it, discomfort. Some No Wave filmmakers burrowed deeper underground, into the “Cinema of Transgression,” spearheaded by Nick Zedd. His 1979 shock-sleaze film They Eat Scum was described in The Wall Street Journal as “the vilest and most revolting performance of sadism I have ever seen,” its critic concluding with a plea: “Please do something to stop it.”

It did stop - rather abruptly. No Wave crashed in 1987 - washed out by the rising tides of MTV and the Wall Street-fueled Soho gallery scene. By the 1990s, drugs and AIDS were ravaging the community, and downtown was metamorphosing from Bohemia to Bloomingdale’s. The weirdos died or fled.

That No Wave has left barely a smudge on the grand tapestry of cinema history might strike some of its filmmakers as the ultimate success. “No forethought. No afterthought. No ambition. No thoughts of the future,” was the mantra, according to Lydia Lunch. But why pursue something so willfully vacant, you might wonder - and what, if anything, can today’s dispossessed filmmakers learn from it?

To answer this, we must first confront how violently the world has changed since No Wave washed out. One-bedrooms in the East Village now rent for $6,000 per month. Screens abound, gushing endless “content,” numbing us to the supposed shock of hard-lit, drugged-out, faltering improvs. Sure, we can still appreciate the cool hair and emulsion scars, but aesthetics alone, however raw or exotically rendered, are hollow.

In his 1979 book “Subculture: The Meaning of Style,” Dick Hebdige contends that subcultures exist to express “a fundamental tension between those in power and those condemned to subordinate positions and second-class lives.” To trigger a new No Wave, then, is not to replicate its “vibe,” or march in its shadow, but to locate the bricolage of our own moment, and produce movies that confront the material, social, and psychic pressures of the present. To defy algorithm-optimized brevity and superficiality, and carve out a new place where art can happen again, with or without money. A new land of yes.

“To me, the most important thing is the power of ideas and expression. And in a way, it’s the most powerful thing that humans have. So I like to think about all the lying, murdering thugs that have all the political and financial power - all of that power is not equal to the power of ideas.” - Jim Jarmusch

News Reel

“As a filmmaker, you have to believe in the people, in their power, because if you do not believe in the people then why do you make the film… for what? If you don’t have hope, you do not do a fucking movie.” Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director revered by art-house audiences for his austere epics Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, died Monday in Budapest. RIP.
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And now, this week’s Underexposed Movie Pick:

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky)

“I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened,” Béla Tarr once groused. “In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another … All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine — time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.”

This is an apt primer for Werckmeister Harmonies, a film composed of just 39 shots stretched across 145 glacial minutes. Tarr’s films embody everything arthouse devotees revere and detractors loathe - languid pacing, mud-caked peasants, merciless gloom, etc. Depending on your mood, these films can be transportive dreams - or punishing slogs.

I confess, I’ve experienced them both ways. Yet in an era of perpetual noise, the austerity of slow cinema has only grown more seductive. Adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel “The Melancholy of Resistance,” Werckmeister Harmonies follows János, a young newspaper deliveryman in a desolate Hungarian village during the communist era. When a strange traveling circus arrives, an unseen “Prince” incites unrest through his speeches, and the town’s fragile order collapses.