Eric Mitchell (filmmaker)
Eric Mitchell is a French born American writer, director, and actor who moved to downtown New York City in the early 1970s. He has acted in many No Wave films such as Permanent Vacation by Jim Jarmusch, but is best known for his own films that are usually written and directed by him: 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. Mitchell worked out of New York City's sordid East Village area in conjunction with Colab and other performance artists and noise musicians. There he 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.
Early life
Mitchell came of age in the French art world, as his father, artist Luc Simon, was companion of painter Françoise Gilot between her marriage to Picasso and her subsequent marriage to Jonas Salk. Mitchell himself began to work, as a teenager, as an assistant photographer on the French magazine Lui, shooting with leading glamour models of the day.Performance and music
In the mid-1970s, Mitchell mounted several multi-media events at The Kitchen in New York that were documented by Jimmy De Sana. With fellow artist Martin Kippenberger, Mitchell released the punk rock single Luxus in 1979.Acting
Mitchell has acted in Permanent Vacation by Jim Jarmusch and in Amos Poe's no wave classics Unmade Beds and The Foreigner, where he plays a young Frenchman in New York that is hotly pursued up and down the busy streets of New York City by thugs. Along the way he encounters a couple of bizarre young women. Mitchell also performs in the films J'ai vu tuer Ben Barka by Serge Le Péron and Saïd Smihi, Minus Zero by Michael Oblowitz, Men in Orbit by John Lurie, The Scenic Route by Mark Rappaport, Candy Mountain by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, and in James Nares's no wave film farce Rome '78, among others.Artwork
As a lifelong painter, draughtsman, and illustrator, Mitchell had a retrospective exhibition of his work called Call It Nothing in 2006 at Mitchell Algus Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan and has had his work featured in The New Yorker and the Bergdorf Goodman Magazine.Film style
During the late 1970s to early 1980s, Mitchell was among the most significant proponents of the punk art bohemian style of No Wave Cinema. This low-budget style of underground punk filmmaking concerned itself with the art theory issues of neo-expressionism and simulation that were then typical of an emerging postmodernism.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 Mitchell embraced their brand of DIY vanguard movie making. Inspired by the films of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Waters and The French New Wave; Mitchell's films combined elements of documentary and loose narrative structure, somewhat like the methods of Jean-Luc Godard, with stark, at times confrontational, visual imagery. Much like the No Wave music of the period, Mitchell pillaged the nascent East Village, Manhattan art scene for co-conspirators, like Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, Patti Astor, Vincent Gallo, John Lurie, Steve Buscemi, Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller and many others.
Mitchell's fast and cheap mindset was catalyzed by these collaborations and the New York post-punk music and punk visual art scene. Mitchell's influential stylist neo-film noir films were showcased at Colab's New Cinema on Astor Place and at punk rock venues like the Mudd Club, CBGB and Tier 3.
Films
''Kidnapped''
Kidnapped, his first feature, took on political terrorism, recasting it in the form of a group improvisation for jaded, aimless bohemian types. The deadpan acting style the actors indulge in owes much to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol. Indeed, Kidnapped was inspired by Vinyl, a black-and-white experimental film directed by Warhol at The Factory starring Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick and Ondine – an early adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange. In Kidnapped, Mitchell, Anya Phillips and Gordon Stevenson hang around a cramped lower east side apartment. Coolly, they talk with each other and dance and fight with each other as the no wave music of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks plays on the stereo within the movie set. Like in a Warhol film, oftentimes nothing much happens in the plot, until towards the end the players go and kidnap Mudd Club owner Steve Mass and abuse him.''Red Italy''
Jaded political satire also figured in Mitchell's next Super 8mm black and white 60-minute feature, Red Italy. Here the actor-director created a tongue-in-cheek parody/homage to Italian Neorealism film. Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1961 Accattone is directly quoted in a scene. It tells a story of a lost post-war generation through a small cast of participants that include a black American soldier, a Czech hipster in love with Monica, and the "Italian" Gino. Gino is a young disillusioned Communist rock music singer who is a daytime Fiat factory worker living a bohemian life at night. He sings and dances to a version of the Gene Vincent song Be-Bop-a-Lula. The film's co-star is a glamour-ridden jaded starlet named Monica, played by Jennifer Miro, who in actuality was a member of the San Francisco punk rock band The Nuns. Cameo performances are given by Patti Astor, Rene Ricard, James Nares, Scott Wardell, John Lurie and Arto Lindsay. The musical soundtrack is provided mainly by the surf rock music by the American instrumental pop group The Marketts and two uncredited Twist songs, that are danced to.Red Italy is supposedly set in Rome but was actually shot at "Italian movie'"-type locations in New York City, including the rides at Coney Island, an espresso bar, an Italian restaurant in Little Italy, Manhattan, and a vacant lot. Much of it is shot in a car. During conversation, references are made to Eddie Cochran, Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Norman Mailer and the painter Bernard Buffet. A poster of a painting of Mao Zedong by Andy Warhol is used as a set devise that subverts the early 60s time period and gives the film a postmodern feel. Mitchell has called his movie "a portrait of a bored, disenchanted woman in post-war Italy." Indeed, disillusion and boredom are Mitchell's major themes in Red Italy, which connects it to the 1975 Italian film The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni, but Mitchell also touches on the themes of Fascism, Communism, Americanization, Class conflict and love. Following Red Italy, boredom as an emotional stance is maintained and explored throughout most of Eric Mitchell's no wave films. Red Italy benefited from a grant from Artists Space and has been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.