Guest
THE BOWERY — It is the Spring of 1994 and independent filmmaker Sara Driver is caught in the waning days of the storied Lower Manhattan street with a video-camera. She’s never worked with video before and she’s been tasked with capturing “her NYC” by a French TV Channel for a series titled Postcards from NY. Off she goes, “no money baloney, no headaches,” just a sure-fire determination to document her community before it disappears. This punk attitude and proclivity for detailing her environs define the odd frequencies of Sara Driver’s cinema, one we’re excited to celebrate by showing The Bowery–Spring, 1994 in collaboration with Roxy Cinema’s current series “On the Bowery,” a tribute to Driver’s directed films as well as those she loves, including her portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boom for Real, and the surreal caper Judex by Georges Franju, among other attractions. “One mile long, from Chatham Square to Cooper Square, ‘been a road as long as anyone can remember,” says author Lucy Sante, who narrates the videotape from beginning to end. Its mythos as a site of lurid and peculiar attractions precedes it, but Driver accentuates its more human elements by positioning her camera before passersby and catching their ramblings in media res. These improvised recordings display a local language, flaring with a shared excitement and genuine wonder about its surroundings. “The Bowery was one of my favorite streets in NYC. Every day or night you would overhear or see something totally human and poetic whether it was heartbreaking, violent or humorous. In Merriam-Webster Dictionary one of the definitions of Bowery, street in New York City: a city district known for cheap bars and derelicts.” SARA DRIVER
