Reviews of THE BLANK GENERATION > Scenes from the film

An invaluable document of a long-lost era, The Blank Generation "sets the style for the Punk Documentary—raw, sloppily spliced, unsynched footage of bands, with sound recorded by cassette. The effect is total disorientation and CBGBs performances by Talking Heads ("Psycho Killer"), Blondie ("He left Me"), Ramones ("Shock Treatment", "1-2-3-4, Let's Go") Tuff Darts and many of the other New York bands fill up this frantic, crowd-pleasing film.

—Cream

CBGB, the small Bowery Avenue club that spawned and nurtured American punk and New Wave music in the mid-70s, closed earlier this fall after a three-decade run. Fortunately, New York filmmaker Amos Poe was hanging out at CBGB in its early days and began filming performances by many of the musicians who would become the stars of the late 70s/early 80s as the rest of America embraced punk and New Wave music and style. Taking his silent 16mm footage and separate audio cassette recordings, Poe and co-director Ivan Kral (guitarist for Patti Smith) put together a documentary, "Blank Generation" (1976), that exemplified a punkish attitude toward film structure with handheld zooms, angled compositions, floodlight lighting, extreme close-ups, elliptical editing, flash pans, and a general in-your-face and “up-yours” stance. Sound and image purposely do not synch. In many cases music and image were recorded on separate nights more economical because of the high cost of raw film stock with sound, but also an aesthetic nod to Jean-Luc Godard who had slashed the umbilical cord uniting sound and image. Out of the French New Wave came the New York No Wave. Neither a collection of music videos nor a straightforward documentary, "Blank Generation" captures in embryonic form vital appearances of the Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, Television, and, most belligerently of all, Patti Smith.

In the film the Patti Smith Group performs a rousing version of “Gloria” that makes you want to jump, scream, and run around the room/block/world. With her androgynous looks, thriftshop clothing, snarling voice, biting lyrics, and middle-finger attitude, Patti Smith is obviously well on her way to becoming the intellectual godmother of punk. Television (with Tom Verlaine) performs “Little Johnny Jewel,” complete with an insert of a portable TV being tossed off a building (a forerunner of music videos incorporating performance and dramatic recreations). The Ramones come on with “Shock Treatment” and “1,2,3,4, Let’s Go,” providing a sad moment while realizing 1,2,3 are already gone. Their leather jackets, sunglasses, pageboy haircuts, and plenty of proto-punk attitude helped establish one style for male punks. Looking very art-school, almost preppie, David Byrne and The Talking Heads perform “Psycho Killer” and bring their soul-stirring rhythms into the mix. The outrageous Wayne County with his big hair wig, high heels, and shapely legs in fishnet stockings (obviously influenced by Charles Ludlum’s Theater of the Ridiculous, John Waters’ films with Divine, and the New York Dolls in their gender-bender period of 1973) sings the lovely “Rock ‘n’ Roll Enema” while brandishing a toilet plunger. Not a pretty sight but not meant to be. And then there is Blondie, with the deadly gorgeous Deborah Harry and her perfect cheekbones, artful makeup, and blonde superstar hair. A complete antithesis of Patti Smith, Harry harkens back to the era of the chanteuse and the Hollywood siren of the 30s.

The presence of both artists at CBGB shows that it was a very flexible musical era. Even the title of the film, inspired by the Television song, indicates open possibilities in the mid-70s "The Blank Generation" suggests that in 1975-1976 it was still a [fill in the blank] generation with no definition, self-imposed or media-determined. That was a post-Watergate, post-hippie, post-activist time of new possibilities, all clearly championed and captured in Amos Poe’s film.

—Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
12/06

Reviews of THE BLANK GENERATION/DANCING BAREFOOT DVD

New York 1975. CBGBs was ground zero for the burgeoning punk rock / new wave movement and this double feature DVD puts you right in the heart of the action.

Documentaries don't get much more punk rock than Blank Generation. Directed and produced by Amos Poe and Ivan Kral, grainy footage of the Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads, Television, Wayne County, Johnny Thunders and others onstage, backstage and doing....whatever are spliced together, seemingly at random. Demo sessions and live tracks that sound like piss-poor cassettes serve as the soundtrack, but bear no relation whatsoever to the visuals. Depending on your perspective and tolerance level, this can be brilliant or completely infuriating–maybe a little of both. I'm fortunate that I got to see most of the bands back in the day in small clubs here in San Francisco, but for those who missed out, this may or may not serve as an adequate substitute.

Dancing Barefoot was produced for Czech television in 1994 and focuses on the life and career of Ivan Kral. Due to his father's outspoken political beliefs, Ivan's family was booted out of Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the U.S. A budding musician since the eighth grade, he soon found his place as a member of the Patti Smith Group and remained with them up through their final recording sessions. This period of his career is the centerpiece of the film and features some wonderful live footage of the PSG performing at various locales around the world. Interviews with patti and other musicians from the late '70s (Talking Heads, Debbie Harry, John Cale, Hilly Kristal) document the heyday of CBGBs and the eventual commercial success of many of the acts from New York's underground music scene. Following the breakup of PSG, Ivan worked with Iggy Pop, John Waite and several other bands before moving to Seattle and opening a crepe stand.

Dancing Barefoot contains a fair amount of Ivan's 8mm footage seen in Blank Generation, but given its context, is nowhere nearly as frustrating to watch. These two films together serve as a valuable historical document of one of the last great periods of musical revolution in recent memory and its a reminder of where bands like the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Rapture and others got their inspiration from.

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