Lower East Side, NYC, at the turn of the 70s, a radical scene emerges. Originally driven into the area by the low rent prices, people active in of all sorts of artistic expression gradually start breaking down all codes and conventions. No-wave music rears its ugly head, more and more disturbed happenings take place; painters and sculptors develop a new style, encompassing their heterogenous and multicultural background and reviving its legacy. Finding its unity in an opposition to the growing conservatism of Reagan America, this movement reaches its culmination with the apology of political incorrectness, of which Richard Kern is undoubtedly the most sizzling advocate. Born in 1954 to a North Carolina newspaper photographer and editor, Kern is exposed to the delights of photography from a very early age. In 1979 the young man, who by then has learnt to express his voyeuristic urges through this particular medium, joins the NYC scene as he moves into a grimy tenement house packed with broke artists and heroin dealers. In his seedy appartment he sets up a photography studio and starts shooting female friends, neighbours, one-night stands, in provocative, sometimes obscene postures. Those early works, which would eventually lead to his most renowned series, 'New York Girls', were printed and distributed by himself through fanzines like "The Heroin Addict" or "The Valium Addict". At the same time, Richard, ever willing to disturb, challenge, or even shock his audience, takes part in a few performances and by 1983 begins to shoot short movies on Super-8.
With film scores by the likes of Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and Sonic Youth, actors covered in blood and mire, and production means close to null, he contributes to the rise of what Nick Zedd (one of his close associates and fellow directors) calls 'Cinema of Transgression'. To this day his films remain the most striking and brilliant in the whole movement and leave astonished, fascinated, and sometimes outraged audiences in their trail... such as the German feminist leagues who in 1990 loudly opposed the screening of Fingered in Berlin, and today praise it as an ode to feminism - perhaps convinced in this by the very presence of Lydia Lunch, whose stance on feminism has become less ambiguous throughout the years. What could be more gratifying to Kern, the troublemaker?
He now has a more mature hindsight on his own work, recognizing the important role played by drugs both in nourishing the roots of his creativity, the fury of self-destructive nihilism, and in hiding its true dimension from his own eyes. After the release of Submit To Me Now in 1987, he gets off the hard drugs, takes a year off, and steps back from the scene. When he gets back to New York his movies take on a new angle, no less subversive, but more questioning towards his role and status as an artist. He starts to integrate the man behind the camera into his movies and subjects him to tease and taunt, bears a new perspective on himself and revels in self-mockery. Without rejecting the past or its legacy, he puts an end to his career as a film director in 1993 - with the exception of a few erotic projects and music videos for Sonic Youth, Marilyn Manson, and the Breeders - and focuses on photography, paving the way for the the pornochic trend that was soon to follow. Whatever real impact he, and Cinema of Transgression in general, may have had on today's filmmaking, one thing remains certain: no such thing ever existed beforehand, nor has since. A short-lived movement in the history of cinema, it remains first and foremost a testimonial to a particular time and place, a swarming of venomous artistic creation which still fascinates today through its radical, innovative, and amoral qualities.
