Eric Mitchell (filmmaker and actor)
| Eric Mitchell | |
|---|---|
| Born | France |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, actor |
Eric Mitchell is a French born writer, director and actor who moved to New York City in the early 1970s. He has acted in films such Permanent Vacation (1980) by Jim Jarmusch, but he is best known for his writing and directing his own films: Kidnapped, Red Italy, Underground U.S.A. and The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues, starring Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo, Mark Boone Junior and Rockets Redglare.
During the late 1970s to early 1980s, Eric Mitchell was among the most significant proponents of the punk bohemia, No Wave Cinema, no-budget style of underground punk filmmaking that was concerned with issues of simulation typical of postmodernism. He worked out of New York City's East Village area in conjunction with Colab and other performance artists and noise musicians and created a series of scruffy, deeply personal short Super 8mm and 16mm films in which he combined darkly sinister images to explore the manner in which the individual is constrained by society. Rising from the ashes of a bankrupt and destitute 1970’s Manhattan, and reacting to the modernist aesthetic of 1960’s avant-garde film, No Wave filmmakers like Eric Mitchell threw out the rules and embraced their own brand of vanguard moviemaking. Inspired by the films of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, John Waters and The French New Wave, Mitchell's films combined elements of documentary and loose narrative structure, somewhat like Jean-Luc Godard, with stark, at times confrontational imagery. Much like the No Wave music of the period from which the movement garnered its label, Mitchell pillaged the nascent East Village arts scene for co-conspirators in the likes of Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, Vincent Gallo, Steve Buscemi, Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller and many others. Mitchell shared the common mindset of fast and cheap, and was catalyzed by collaboration. This No Wave style rose from the ashes of such gloom, when even nihilism had expired. Its influence remains, but the movement was little more than a cultural blip in New York City history: the brief harmony of music, visual art and film in downtown Manhattan, showcased nightly at New Cinema on Astor Place and at small punk rock venues like CBGB and Tier 3 and at punk art clubs like the Mudd Club.
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