This review essay appeared in Cineaste 31:2, Spring 2006.

Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, edited by Clayton Patterson. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. 586 pp., illus. Paperback: $26.95.

   By the time I’d read a few dozen pages of Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, it was clear to me that Clayton Patterson’s anthology of 112 essays is meant more for browsing than for reading straight through. For reviewing purposes I was determined to read it straight through anyway, and after a few dozen more pages it occurred to me that I might be the only person who’d ever do this besides Patterson, who’s billed as “editor/curator/producer” of the volume.
   After a few dozen more pages, I changed my mind. A book with this many typos, misspellings, and factual errors couldn’t have been read with much care by even its own editor—or editors, since Patterson shares credit on the title page with two others (Paul Bartlett and Urania Mylonas) plus no fewer than sixteen contributing editors. With so many people overseeing the volume, you wouldn’t expect Todd Haynes’s name to become Todd Ames in one of the essays, or for editor Mylonas’s first name to be spelled two different ways on the title page and in Patterson’s introduction.
   But hey, we’re talking Lower East Side here, so I’ll stop being picky. For artists the whole point of the LES is that it’s never been politically, aesthetically, or typographically correct. It’s been a “mystery place,” a “magic other, forever uncharted,” as auteur Abel Ferrara puts it in his brief preface. It’s hard to pinpoint even as a location. For some residents it blurs with the East Village and Alphabet City and Loisaida into a single great terrain. For others--especially those who’ve taken sides in the area’s many ethnic, political, and real-estate rivalries--it encompasses a multitude of micro-districts with distinct, sometimes clashing personalities.
   The editors of Captured take an inclusive view of what they call the LES/EV scene. They’re not fussy about its geographical boundaries (broadly definable as lower Manhattan’s eastern half) and they don’t even require actual residency there as a qualification for inclusion in the volume. “Many people that were part of the LES/EV art community never lived in the LES/EV,” observe Bartlett and Mylonas at the beginning of the book. It’s enough if you’re one of the many who “created art, showed their art, and socialized” in the locale.
   The best thing about Captured is the way it embodies the anarchic LES/EV spirit. While it has the heft of a coffee-table book, it has the look and feel of a leaflet you’d find on a subway seat, printed on pulpy, not-quite-flimsy paper behind a black-and-white cover displaying a proudly outmoded Super-8 projector. The essays are equally casual, in keeping with the editors’ democratic goal of allowing LES/EV artists to discuss their film and video experiences in any mode—reportorial, reflective, scrappy, propagandistic, you name it—that seems appropriate to them. The pieces often read like eccentric, from-the-hip pamphlets mingling fact, opinion, and ‘tude.
   Generally speaking, one expects a collection like this to appear when an artistic scene is at its height (ripe for celebration) or when it’s fading (ripe for rescue attempts). Captured arrives after the party’s over. By now the LES has “passed the point of beginning gentrification, like SoHo and Greenwich Village,” as Patterson puts it, and the area’s “beautiful chaos” has subsided. Accordingly, the volume’s dominant tone is rooted in the distinctly bourgeois emotion of nostalgia for a vanished golden age. Its accounts, memoirs, and reflections frequently resemble exercises in salvage anthropology penned by ethnographers thrilled to have been there at the last possible moment to experience a unique sociohistorical moment whose likes will never exist again.
   Such feelings notwithstanding, the age hasn’t entirely vanished. Altered by sundry mutations and variations, it lives on in other enclaves, of which the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn is currently the most prominent. And as ages go, it wasn’t exactly golden. Many of the Captured chroniclers seem most enthusiastic about figures who were already aging veterans (Allen Ginsberg, Emile de Antonio, Jonas Mekas, Taylor Mead, Bill Rice) when they themselves first arrived. That enthusiasm is well placed: There’s no way that even the most visible LES/EV icons of the 1970s and 1980s can claim degrees of originality, influence, and sheer cultural clout comparable to those of the 1950s and 1960s pioneers who paved the way for them. The endlessly self-congratulating Cinema of Transgression gang headed by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, for instance, will surely not live in history as vigorously as Mekas, de Antonio, Jack Smith, Harry Smith, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and other old-schoolers who also (thankfully) appear in the Captured hall of fame. For another example, the admirably experimental programming at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema has gathered (and continues to gather) a rich reputation stretching far beyond the LES/EV, but it’s unlikely the RBMC’s efforts on behalf of progressive cinema will ever equal those of Anthology Film Archives, which remains the closest approximation there may ever be to a world headquarters of avant-garde film.
   All of this said, the party’s not really over, as the RBMC’s very existence shows. And when the party was in full swing—the era documented in Captured, centered on but not limited to the 1980s--it produced a considerable amount of praiseworthy work, much of it created by people still active in their fields today. Leaving aside ongoing accomplishments by senior figures like Mekas and Mead, examples include the valuable film-distribution labors of M.M. Serra at the Film-makers Cooperative; the risk-taking exhibition work of Phil Hartman and Doris Kornish; the adventurous criticism and programming of Ed Halter; the no-holds-barred film and video production of innumerable writers, directors, technicians, and performers; the photography, documentation, and all-around positive thinking of Patterson himself; and too much more to be enumerated here.
   Captured provides a roster of personalities, a record of achievements, and a spirited celebration of the many good things that have happened in and around the LES/EV film-and-video scene. It also pays some attention (if not enough) to the bad things that have happened, usually related to the neighborhood’s ever-active crime (and drug) problems, the instability of some of the edgier artists, or both. I like the book’s mostly buoyant tone, but I find it refreshing when an essay goes against the upbeat grain, which not many do, perhaps because transgressing against transgression is still taboo. I therefore applaud LES/EV movie star Casandra Stark Mele, who argues that the Cinema of Transgression evolved away from a true underground esthetic, trading indifference toward fortune and fame for the money and “ego gratification” associated with what she boldly calls “the pornography market.” At the opposite end of the spectrum is Cricket Delembard’s memoir of the Cinema of Transgression, which rattles off a catalogue of scandal-worthy incidents (“Rik Strange…then fled to Salem, Massachusetts, where he briefly headed a coven of witches who were accused of dealing drugs to children”) in a disingenuously deadpan tone.
   By bringing together such a wide range of contributions, Captured adds up to a hugely eclectic scrapbook. Readers looking for pre-1980s history will find references to the Dadaists, the surrealists, the Beats, and the abstract expressionists. There are items for techno-art buffs, such as Patterson’s long Jeffrey Lerer interview, and for multimedia-performance fans, such as Robert A. Haller’s brief account of Amy Greenfield’s dance-oriented work. There are famous names like Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Paul Morrissey, and Luis Guzmán; sort-of-famous ones like Rudy Burckhardt, Herbert Huncke, and Rockets Redglare; updates on what former moving-image pioneers like Jud Yalkut and Davidson Gigliotti have on their minds nowadays; and one-of-a-kind rants like Zedd’s insanely overwritten review of a Jack Smith exhibition, which he penned in a fit of rage over being allegedly “airbrushed out of the Jack Smith story by a pack of vultures who came to feast on his corpse after his demise”—quite a description of filmmaker Jerry Tartaglia and critic J. Hoberman, whose commitment to Smith’s legacy seems unquestionable to me.
   It all adds up to a long, lavishly illustrated, frequently enlightening, sometimes amusingly demented tour of the epoch when, as Ann Magnuson puts it with dead-on accuracy, “the nefarious, pre-Disneyfied isle of Manhattan still had a wild side to walk on.”—David Sterritt