When art was fun.

CAPTURED: A FILM/VIDEO HISTORY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE

EDITED BY CLAYTON PATTERSON

NEW YORK: SEVEN STORIES PRESS, 2005

568 PP./$24.00 (SB)

The book Captured reflects the Lower East Side art scene it depicts--a do-it-yourself, low-budget undertaking that manages to be simultaneously brilliant, provocative, madcap, and exasperatingly disorganized. Nearly one hundred members of the neighborhood's film community contributed essays to this hefty book, which reads like gossip, art criticism, and manifesto all rolled into one. If you are willing to sort out who's who, and what happened when, Captured provides a unique, insider's history of experimental film--from the Dada-inspired Fluxus movement to Andy Warhol's Factory to the rise of the indie film in the 1980s.

It is, as editor Clayton Patterson intended, "an ethnographic notebook" of a time and place. And what a time and place! For three decades--from the 1960s through the 1980s--the Lower East Side was America's answer to Paris in the '20s. A swirling mix of Beat poets, punk rockers, painters, and experimental filmmakers were drawn to the neighborhood by its cheap rent and sense of artistic possibilities. Looking back now, what is amazing is not only how much art came from this single square mile of Manhattan but how spontaneous and pure it all was. Back then, as performance artist Penny Arcade remarks in the book, "Careerism in art as we know it today did not yet exist" (15).

"It made you feel that anything was possible," writes Lower East Side director Jim Jarmusch. (Indeed, the phrase "anything was possible" appears as a leitmotif throughout the book.) Before his debut film, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), made him a name in the indie world, Jarmusch found inspiration in neighborhood haunts like the Mudd Club and Max's Kansas City:</p> <pre> That whole scene was incredibly inspiring because people were making music not in an attempt to get signed or become stadium acts. They were really expressing something they felt. Also you didn't have to be a professional musician in ... a Jimmy Page style. You could be Joey Ramone. That affected how I looked at filmmaking (224). </pre> <p>[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Guerilla-style filmmaking became popular around the same time, leading scores of Lower East Siders to think, "I can do this, too." And they did. Rachel Amodeo's account of how she came to make What About Me (1993)--a film about East Village life on the skids--sounds uncannily like one of those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movies where the kids decide "Hey, let's put on a play! I have some old costumes in the garage!" Lower East Siders offered to work on Amodeo's film for free, even before she had decided what it would be about. And instead of adhering to a rigid shooting schedule, she simply went out with her camera whenever she felt like it. This freewheeling spontaneity led to fresh, innovative filmmaking in New York.

Captured also reminds us that Lower East Siders didn't just make experimental films--they largely created the American audience for them. Several of the book's essays are devoted to the Anthology Film Archives--"the first film museum/movie theater dedicated to the notion of film as art," as Carlos Kase writes (85). Founded by Jonas Mekas in 1969 and modeled on the European cinematheque, Anthology introduced New Yorkers to now-canonical films like Battleship Potemkin (1925, by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov), Rules of the Game (1939, by Jean Renoir), and Citizen Kane (1941, by Orson Welles), as well as to avant-garde work like Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963). Today, with indie and art films available at Blockbuster or for sale on the Internet, it is easy to forget how radical this was.

Despite Captured's "art-for-art's sake" politics, however, money is a central preoccupation in the book. Nearly all the authors write about how cheap their rent was, how little they earned, or how now-revered institutions like Anthology and Club 57 operated on pass-the-hat budgets instead of big grants. Many of the authors affect a smug, anti-commercialism attitude. Back in their day, no one had money, but they didn't need it.

A story recounted multiple times in the book is Smith's encounter with a young student from the School of Visual Arts. This student revered Smith and was anxious to know what art school he had attended. Smith snarled, "Art school? I didn't have the luxury of going to art school. I had to come to New York and go straight to work making art" (17). Today, of course, the conversation would probably be reversed. Move to Manhattan to make art? With no plan to make a living from it? Ha! Who can afford that type of luxury any more?

Old-time Lower East Siders complain that today's art and film school graduates are too focused on commercial success. While the criticism may be true, it's also unfair. No one has thirty dollar-a-month apartments on Orchard Street anymore. These days, the Lower East Side wears Prada, and would-be artists work two jobs to afford a walkup in Williamsburg. The fabled creative playground where non-conformists could live cheaply, stay up all night, and make art for their own pleasure, is over. That's why the collective nostalgia for the Lower East Side is so strong.

Patterson sums it up when he writes that, "The days of glancing down the street in the morning light and seeing what creative mushrooms have sprouted up over night is gone. Creative anarchy is gone, and the dust has settled. Not to say no more art will be made, but the beautiful chaos has ended" (xvi).

LISA HUNTER is an arts journalist and author of the forthcoming book How to Buy Art.