Llik Your Idols

French director Angélique Bosio's English-language documentary Llik Your Idols looks at the confrontational Cinema of Transgression film movement, which emerged alongside No Wave music (a response to punk and post-punk music) in Manhattan's Lower East Side during the 1980s. The goal of the Cinema of Transgression was more to disturb the Reagan-era status quo than tell stories, so nudity and violence run rampant, but filmmaker Nick Zedd says he was just externalizing his innermost feelings, adding that “the rule was to break the rule.” As singer/actress Lydia Lunch adds, “The Sixties, with their false sense of hope and revolution, failed miserably,” hence the nihilism permeating many of the works in this short-lived genre (Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore says, “There was so much transgression that I don't think it ever had any sense of future to it.”). Film clips—interwoven throughout the interviews—are rife with over-the-top images, although it's probably not completely fair to compare them with other low-budget efforts of the time (such as the films of Amos Poe and Jim Jarmusch), since they play more like art pieces about exploitation cinema. Other interviewees include director Bruce LaBruce, artist Joe Coleman, singer/novelist Richard Hell, writer Jack Sargeant, vocalist Jarboe, and musician Russell Simmins. In a bonus interview, Bosio says she discovered these outsider artists in her teens and found their work “pretty nasty,” but in a “beautiful” way. Additional extras include a pair of shorts by Zedd. Definitely intended for adult audiences (clitoris-piercing being just one of the many discomforting sights on display), this is recommended for relevant academic studies and more adventurous public library collections. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)