New York City wasn't a place many people wanted to live in the late 1970s and early 80s - unless they were musicians, artists or filmmakers. The crime rate was high and the city was heavily in debt.
But for artists and filmmakers, it was a fertile time and place. Two seminal underground films from this period - Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style and Eric Mitchell's Underground USA (right) - are screening at the Hong Kong Arts Centre as part of its Bande a Part - New York Underground '60s, '70s, '80s series.
Ahearn says the city was an exciting place to make films because music, art and movies were converging. 'There was a lot of mixing of scenes, a lot of people stepping over boundaries and trying to connect things,' he says. 'At clubs like the Roxy, you could find an incredible mixture of celebrities, teenagers from the housing projects, Latinos, black kids and white kids, all mixing together. You could see people like David Bowie, like David Byrne, like Madonna hanging out at these places. There was a sense that anything was possible.'
New York underground film had always had a strong association with the visual arts. Early 1960s pioneers such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas had their roots in fine arts, as did Andy Warhol.
'The New York underground film scene came out of the art scene,' says Richard Porton, co-editor of Cineaste magazine. 'Brakhage, for instance, was a cinematic equivalent of Jackson Pollock - his work was related to the abstract expressionists.'
Films by Mekas, who made so-called visual diaries of his avant-garde friends, and Brakhage's abstract works didn't tell stories. But by the late 70s, underground filmmakers were starting to experiment with narrative. Ahearn's Wild Style - which screened on Sunday at the Arts Centre - looks at graffiti artists and rappers, with characters such as graffiti artist Lee Quinones playing roles loosely based on themselves.
Among the reasons New York filmmakers started telling stories is that they were suddenly able to make films with synchronised sound. 'A lot of people got Super 8 cameras in 1978,' Ahearn says. 'One day word went out that there was a load of Super 8 sound cameras that were being sold off the back of a truck and were going at ridiculously low prices. I bought one and many other people picked one up. They were remarkable devices.