Cinema of Transgression Manifesto
by Nick Zedd
We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde;
i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process
dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged.

We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which
erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to
lock out those filmmakers who possessed the vision to see through this
charade.

We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an
approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge
of the film school took over. Legitimizing every mindless manifestation
of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film
students, the dreary media arts centers and geriatric cinema critics
have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our
rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann,
DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of
filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film
theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.

We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never
be made again. We propose that a sense of humor is an essential element
discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which
doesn't shock isn't worth looking at. All values must be challenged.
Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in
order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.

Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in
political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves.
We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality
or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We
pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and
projectors to a state of expanded cinema.

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in
rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our
age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain
and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall
emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the
hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority
figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having
fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you
can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose
transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and
transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom
in a world full of unknowing slaves.