A Blank Canvas

“It's that do-it-yourself attitude!” yelps Celine Danhier, the French documentarian behind Blank City, a chronicle of the no-wave cinema of New York in the late-'70s and early-'80s that gave the world Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe and Nick Zedd. “This realist, punk attitude; they're all really different films – some are experimental, some are narrative, some are more like documentary – but they are all blurring the line between reality and fiction. I loved that attitude, and it totally inspired me: when you're chronicling a movement of do-it-yourself, you can't then say 'oh, but I'm not really a documentary filmmaker!'”

Danhier may be a documentary filmmaker in practice, but not in training. Instead, the Parisian native spent years at law school (“I could take care of some things [with Blank City] that other filmmakers can't: I could work on getting clearance for music use and film clips”), even though she “always dreamt of going to New York and making films” ever since watching Martin Scorsese's After Hours when she was six.

By the time Danhier was a teenager, her love of rock'n'roll meant her infatuation deepened. “I grew completely entranced by this city,” she recalls. “I was listening to a lot of music from New York City; no-wave bands like Lydia Lunch, The Contortions, DNA. It was all very seductive.”

Danhier followed her love of no-wave music to no-wave cinema; yet, even in this information-rich, reissue-addled age, she found much of it hard-to-find. “I knew the films of Jim Jarmusch and Nick Zedd, but,” she says, “I didn't know who was Eric Mitchell or Amos Poe. So, from Paris I started to track down some of these films, but it was really difficult; and I was surprised that, when I moved to New York, it was still hard. So, I decided I was going to find as many of these films as I could. It seemed natural to make a documentary of that period as I went, because it was a really important time for the independent film movement. It seemed like an incredible topic for me; I couldn't believe no one had made a documentary about it.”

And, so, Danhier, freshly relocated to New York – “I really didn't know anyone at all” – threw herself into the endeavour, inspired by the DIY ethos of those she wished to chronicle. “I didn't have any background in films, or documentary, or electronics, or as a journalist,” she says. “I'd never done anything like this before. I was so amazed that no one had ever made a film about no-wave films or the Cinema Of Transgression. So I just decided that I was going to do it.

“And I just started this doing the most basic internet research; finding the contact addresses for Richard Kern and Amos Poe online, and going from there. By the time I'd be working only about three or four months on Blank City, I was already talking to Jim Jarmusch. There was just really good word-of-mouth spreading between the people who I'd interviewed. And, luckily, when I finished the film, and it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, the people in it – these artists who I really admired and liked – they liked the movie.”