Through The Looking Glass (HPU Photo Club) goes to HIFF.

This week, HPU's upstart photography club called Through The Looking Glass will taking part with the Hawaii International Film Festival. In the first activity as a group, we will be examining the film "Blank City," an homage to the '70s art movement of New Wave cinema.

The trailer is online here.

The synopsis reads:

Blank City
New York City in the late 1970s was a city near bankrupt from the US economic stagnation where electricity blackouts, poverty, spiraling welfare debt and crime rates soared. However, this proved fertile ground for a flourishing community of confrontational artists, musicians and filmmakers.

Taking a punk, do-it-yourself approach, these artists picked up super 8 cameras and began to turn them on themselves and their friends. Artists such as Jim Jarmusch, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and Amos Poe debuted early works to an audience of their peers. Imbuing their art with a poetic anger they carved out a nihilistic, street-level aesthetic that left an indelible mark on the art world.

Full of interviews with the major players and rarely seen footage, BLANK CITY looks at how this explosion of creativity dubbed No Wave Cinema and Cinema of Transgression has lost none of its raw power and the shock-waves still reverberate today.




We as students hope to take mental notes and the practices that came before us, so that we may change today.