CONTOURS: Downtown 81 (2000) / preceded by Closed Mondays (1974) / inaugural screening in partnership with MUBI Canada

Paradise Theatre, Dec. 4 2023

Meandering through the veritable ruins of a razed Lower East Side, Swiss-Italian photographer Edo Bertoglio’s Downtown 81 follows an undiscovered 19-year old Jean-Michel Basquiat (post-hospitalization for an unidentified ailment) trying to sell a painting for a quick buck so he can regain access to his apartment. The propulsive force of the grind takes Basquiat to local haunts—strip clubs, punk venues, and dive bars—where we come across other victims of the hustle. Playing into the idea of the much-mythologized New York scene, the film plays like a Märchen, supplanting knights and princesses with burnouts and sex workers.

Uncanny, shamanic figures further destabilize viewer orientation, providing a sense of careening down the city’s streets alongside Basquiat. Adding to the frenetic energy is a New Wave score performed live by the genre’s mainstays, including The Lounge Lizards, Tuxedomoon, DNA, the Plastics, Melle Mel, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Anyone with a devoted or even cursory interest in the period will thoroughly enjoy the bevy of scene fixtures who appear throughout the film.

Liner notes by Iman Bundu.

Event photography by Nika Thompson.