Cinema of
Transgression Manifesto
by Nick Zedd
We who
have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore,
tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience
stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic
snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded
to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.
We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach
which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school
took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making
undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts
centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating
accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd,
Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation
of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory
in a direct attack on every value system known to man.
We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be
made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded
by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn't shock
isn't worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred.
Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from
the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and
changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who
disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste,
morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men.
We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors
to a state of expanded cinema.
We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals
of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning
as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes
of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there
is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing
yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being
rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many
rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose
transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute
into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full
of unknowing slaves.