Mondo New York
Collector’s Edition
directed by Harvey Keith
starring Joe Coleman, Lydia Lunch, Karen Finley
MVD Entertainment
In 1987, in the waning days of Ronald Reagan’s America and Ed Koch’s New York City, an underground scene of artist, poets, musicians, and performance artists was thriving in and around the East Village in Manhattan. There was palpable anger, as the two-headed dragon of gentrification and AIDS was already grinding through the neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. This anger fueled the art of performers like Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, and Karen Finley. Knowing this moment in time was fragile, producer Stuart S. Shapiro (Night Flight), along with director Harvey Keith, set out to document this time and place, and the result was the cult documentary Mondo New York.
Absent from any home-video release since the days of VHS tape, Mondo New York has returned on Blu-ray from the MVD Rewind Collection and still packs a wallop 30 years later. Taking its name and style from the fad of Italian-produced mondo documentary films from the ’60s, the film is more concerned with entertainment and performance than any form of journalism.
The film follows 17-year-old actress Shannah Laumeister as she walks the dark streets of the East Village in her white tank top and red high tops in search of… well, it isn’t really clear what she is looking for, but she finds S&M clubs, moshing skinheads, cockfighting, drag queens, poets, and performance artists. She witnesses Joe Coleman biting the heads off of mice and blowing himself up with explosives, and Karen Finley covering her naked body in raw eggs and glitter before a blistering tirade against entrepreneurs, and she is even accosted by poet Emilio Cubeiro and Ann Magnuson (Bongwater, Pulsallama). Porn star Annie Sprinkle and Kembra Pfahler of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black make uncredited cameos in the film for sharp-eyed viewers. Shannah acts as audience surrogate, and her enjoyment or revulsion of the acts tracks pretty well with most audience members. The film’s subjects can be jarring, as can some of the production techniques, which blend straight documentary footage with staged performances, where acts drop the name of the movie into their lyrics whenever possible. As stated earlier, Mondo New York is a document, not a documentary. There is no journalism, yet it stands as a stunning time capsule that still wields the power to shock and entertain.
It is easy to look at a film like this and think that it could never be made today, and while that may be true, it isn’t like the film and its performers were without controversy in their day. Karen Finley would become a culture war symbol over a National Endowment for the Arts grant she was denied, Joe Coleman would be repeatedly arrested for his performances (including the one shot for this film), and multiple sequences of animal cruelty were just as upsetting in the ’80s (and in the ’60s, when animal death was a hallmark of the original mondo cycle) as it is today. Not everything in the film is great, and some of it is far less shocking then it was decades ago, but what has really dated the film is that a project like this has been rendered fully superfluous, with phones documenting the world. Still, Mondo New York packs a great deal of power in this document of the end of an era in free expression, in a place that is no longer recognizable. ◼
Joe Coleman • Lydia Lunch • Karen Finley • Emilio Cubeiro • Ann Magnuson • MVD
