Eric Mitchell

Blank City

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.

I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed

January 1966. In a Paris apartment, police discovers the corpse of Georges Figon, the man who broke the scandal of the Ben Barka affair and undermined Gaullist power.

For Sale

A Private detective is hired to trace a woman who ran away and disappeared on her wedding day. The movie follows him and recounts the story of her life through her eyes and the eyes of those interviewed by the detective.

Dreamland

Small-town gangsters and ambitious young girls meet in "Dreamland", where they exchange nervous kisses and green banknotes.

Triple Bogey On A Par Five Hole

The Levys, a glamorous couple, used to make their living robbing golfers, until they met their fatal handicap. Years later, scriptwriter Remy Gravelle decides to observe the Levy progeny as they sail endlessly round Manhattan in their luxury yacht.

Force of Circumstance

A courier who represents Moroccan dissidents arrives in Washington with secret documents.

End of the Night

A domestic accident causes a quiet and simple man to undergo drastic personality changes which will takes him to New York’s underground nightclubs.

Last Cry

This thriller looks at the defection of a terrorist and focuses on frequent violence and repetitive sex scenes with full frontal nudity. Henri (Hubert Lucot) belongs to a terrorist gang that orders him to kill the sister of one of their members. The member himself died when he single-handedly carried out an attack on a carload of American military advisors in Paris. Henri balks at this assignment, since the gang only wants the sister assassinated because they believe that she would name them to the authorities. Instead of following through, Henri runs away, and the others soon follow in hot pursuit.

Candy Mountain

A mediocre musician goes on the road in search of the world's greatest guitar maker

The Way It Is

A group of actors in the East Village of New York City have been rehearsing for a play when the lead actress in the play turns up dead.

The Super-8 Show: Beyond Home Movies

A short survey of the small-gauge narrative film, beginning with the Kuchars' Sylvia's Promise (1962). Primarily focused on East Coast artists, the work of Eric Mitchell, Manuel DeLanda and Ericka Beckman is highlighted.

Permanent Vacation

In downtown Manhattan, a twenty-something boy whose Father is not around and whose Mother is institutionalized, is a big Charlie Parker fan. He almost subconsciously searches for more meaning in his life and meets a few characters along the way.

Only You

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.

The Long Island Four

Based on the true story of four Nazi saboteurs who infiltrated the US in 1942 and were quickly caught and executed, this 80-minute ode to America's irresistibly corruptive allure was the only underground feature by writer-director Anders Grafstrom. A Swedish art director who relocated to NYC, he created this grandiose No-Wave, Super-8 color-epic at the age of 23, only to die in a Mexican car accident a few months after completing the film.

Underground U.S.A.

The Sunset Blvd. of underground cinema, and a suitably ambivalent retrospect on the star-game casualties of New York's upper depths, with Patti Astor statuesquely hysterical as a 20-year-old Norma Desmond, made up to recall Edie Sedgwick and surrounded by Warhol's lost children. We've been here before, but without the hindsight: a camera cruise along a hustler's meat-rack, kitchen-talk over cold canned spaghetti, Taylor Mead grimacing in a spastic dance, the silent stud a sullenly passive observer. Mitchell's ear for campy native wit and eye for figures in a loft-scape happily keep at bay the otherwise contagious NY ennui.

Sleepless Nights

New Cinema cofounder Becky Johnston recently described this little-seen feature as “an East Village reinvention of the Otto Preminger movie *Laura*” that plays “fast and loose with the noir detective genre.”

Men in Orbit

A “sci-fi povera” film shot on Super 8, Men in Orbit features musician Lurie and Eric Mitchell as chain-smoking astronauts in a decrepit New York living room that has been transformed into a spacecraft.

Red Italy

Second feature film by the French-born director is a Bertolucci-style story of a bored, rich woman looking for romance and adventure. She meets an American G.I., dumps him, then falls for a Communist worker.

Rome '78

Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites including Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace. The latter location required ingenuity: Posing as potential renters, Nares and associates asked the manager to show them the apartment, then unlocked the windows on the way out; a few hours later, they broke back into the space, full cast and crew in tow, to shoot the necessary scenes.

Dear Jimmy

How to play a melody? A magic moment, unrepeatable. Life is just a bowl of cherries. Film as art as life as film.

The Scenic Route

An experimental drama that spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.

Kidnapped

Eric Mitchell's debut film, shot in Super 8, stars Mitchell, Anya Phillips, Patti Astor, and Duncan Smith among a crowd of hip "poseurs," talking sex, manners, and politics.

Bikers or Vanity in Leather

1978. USA. A performance film composed by Eric Mitchell, Maripol. Cinematography by James Nares. Staging by Mitchell. Styling by Maripol. With Edwige Belmore, Maripol, Mitchell, Olivier Mosset, JP Roland Levy. Video. 30 min.

The Foreigner

A French special op suffers an existential crisis as he wanders New York City in search of a mission and the requisite connections.

Snakewoman

Stars Patti Astor as a waylaid heroine fending for herself in the wild, filmed guerilla style in Central Park.

Unmade Beds

Sketched loosely, the narrative of Poe's first feature is as scrappy and paper-thin as its protagonist Rico, a self-styled loner in New York City circa 1976 who longs to inhabit the "New Wave" scene of mid-60s Paris. In Rico's day-to-day life as an unsuccessful photographer, he wearily searches for authentic connection-- even as he spouts the most inauthentic prose imaginable.

Minus Zero

A psycho noir where stalkers, terrorists and government agents collide.

Snake Woman

Snake Woman, created by Downtown artist and beloved Queen of the Mudd Club Tina L’Hotsky, stars Astor as a waylaid heroine fending for herself in the wild. Filmed guerilla style in Central Park, the film’s exotic élan and theatrical performances express an homage to 1940s-era jungle movies and the underground cinema of Jack Smith.