The Blank Generation

Book launch :“Accidental Archivism. Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past”,  edited by hg. von Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and und Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Artistic Director Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst), published in the “Configurations of film” series with meson press.

Followed by:
Vaginal Davis’s famous series, Rising Stars, Falling Stars, which took place at the Arsenal from 2006 to 2018, is back for one evening. On the occasion of the book launch, she presents Amos Poe’s THE BLANK GENERATION (1975), a home movie about the birth of New York punk with Iggy Pop, Blondie, and Patti Smith. Her musical “partner in grime,” as she would say, is the one and only Daniel Hendrickson.
“Shortly after moving to Berlin from Hollywood in 2006, Vaginal Davis started sniffing through the vaults of the Arsenal. She sensed that the Berlin archive was a good place to start looking for early feminist and queer traces. The result was Rising Stars, Falling Stars—a monthly series of experimental rarities, longforgotten commercial films, and even familiar classics of early cinema, viewed from her tilted perspective. Each screening was accompanied by live musicians and introduced by Ms. Davis.” (Davis, 2012, quoted from a conversation between Marc Siegel and Vaginal Davis, in Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past.)

As a participant in the “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice” project, Vaginal Davis has extended her screenings to sound films. In “Rising Stars, Falling Stars – We Must Have Music!” she presented musical highlights from Arsenal's archive, amongst others THE BLANK GENERATION. As part of the project, a reader that contains most of Davis's fascinating introductory texts has been published to celebrate five years of “Rising Stars, Falling Stars.“ (download PDF)