Richard Kern was one of the key filmmakers of the Cinema of Transgression, a movement born out of the wildly fertile arts scene of 1980s Downtown NYC. The more outre and confrontational wing of the No Wave cinema movement, Kern and his cohorts took equally from folks like Andy Warhol and John Waters as they did from the punk and post-punk scenes, blending it all into something truly challenging in both aesthetics and taste. Typically filming on Super 8 film (and later on video) these movements created a wilfully abrasive and purposefully shocking cinema aesthetic that used its technological crudity as both tool and weapon.

Kern’s works, spanning from 1985 to 1993, attack everything. His films take aim at any and all social structures and good taste. Society, politics, sex, power, the family, all of them equal targets of contempt for Kern’s camera. His films feature collaborations with some of the most important names of the ‘80s NYC downtown arts scene: Sonic Youth, David Wojnarowicz, Lydia Lunch, Jim Thirlwell, Kembra Pfahler, and Karen Finley, among others.

Violent, shocking, erotic – sometimes pornographic, Kern’s work shows a different side of rage of the ‘80s America under Ronald Reagan. His cinema is a distinctly urban artistic reaction to the reactionary politics of conservative America. Here we see the worship of power and the power of worship. Violence as politics and sex, sex as politics and violence. The existential stress that is the Cold War-era American family with Daddy Reagan, drunk with power, abusing us all. 

40 years later, Kern’s work still feels equally provocative and unsettling – probably because America has only become that much more conservative and reactionary.

Optical Noise and FACETS wishes to thank Richard Kern for personally making these films available to us for this screening.