The No Wave filmmaking movement of the early 1980s produced a smattering of stone-cold classics that are routinely celebrated by in-the-know film nerds (Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, Bette Gordon’s Variety), but most of its cinematic output never escaped containment the way the same scene’s musical acts did (Sonic Youth, Bush Tetras, Swans), give or take the later post-No Wave successes of Jim Jarmusch. That’s largely because wide commercial success was never the goal. The No Wave scene could only exist because early-80s NYC living was cheap enough for artists to afford treating the city like a playground, running around filming plotless movies and playing structureless noise music for no audience other than themselves and their own burnout friends. That is, until core No Wavers Scott B & Beth B scaled up their usual no-budget, no-permit production style in the 1982 neo-noir Vortex, aiming to make A Real Movie for A Real Audience instead of just circulating aggressively anti-commercial art films amongst peers. Their attempts to upscale the No Wave aesthetic seems small in retrospect. They shot on 16mm instead of Super-8 to attract legitimate distributors; they shot on sound stages instead of running around city streets; they hired working actor (and part-time gravedigger) James Russo to star opposite their usual muse & collaborator Lydia Lunch; they even completed a script before shooting scenes so as to not waste time of the additional crew needed to operate all their new, fancy equipment. The result is a film that halfway-sorta resembles a professionally-produced studio picture but maintains the deliberately aimless, abstracted arthouse sensibility of No Wave proper. It’s stuck in a cinematic limbo, neither one thing nor the other.

No Wave legend Lydia Lunch stars as Angel Powers, playing a noir detective archetype with the lethal sultriness of a femme fatale. After discovering the assassination of a corrupt senator via a mysterious tasing weapon, she finds herself investigating shady weapons dealings in a noirish soundstage otherworld, getting increasingly close & personal with the Big Bad’s jumpy right-hand man (Russo). From there, it’s more a collection of images than it is a story worth retelling. New York artist Bill Rice’s presence as a Dr. Claw-style supervillain constantly on the verge of assassination or world domination provides some recognizable semblance of a plot, but Lunch & Russo mostly just have sex behind his back while deciding whether or not they should kill each other. The actual weapons-trading investigation doesn’t matter as much as the framing of Lunch reading top-secret superweapons manuals in the bathtub while ripping a cig and wearing a full mug, looking like a goth-punk Jayne Mansfield. Beth & Scott B have a lot of fun with the broad look and tropes of noir, shooting most scenes in black sound-stage voids where their characters are shrouded by shadows from all sides and goofing off with for-their-own sake visual gags involving decoded spy messages & jazz club barrooms. You can tell the obligation of having to write a complete script ahead of shooting was a chore for them, though, as there’s little life or meaning in the words their characters exchange while posing in those surreal post-noir environments. With all of the multi-media artists around in the scene who dabbled in poetry (including Lunch herself, who’s celebrated more for her spoken word work than any other facet of her career), you’d think they could’ve found someone who’d put just as much thought & passion into the artistry of the words as they put in the artistry of the images.

While Vortex is paranoid nonsense, it’s at least stylishly paranoid nonsense, so it had me leaning in looking for things to love. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was one William S. Burroughs script punch-up away from being truly brilliant. Whether it was the assassinated senator, the Mr. Big supervillain, or the detective’s junkie ex-partner, I kept fantasy casting Burroughs into various roles throughout the film, desperate to hear his much more poetic way of rambling paranoid nonsense about the shady backroom dealings of NSA-type G-Men. The dialogue is already recited in his cadence, but it’s sorely missing his creaky gravitas. Between Lunch, Rice, and future Bongwater-frontwoman Ann Magnuson, however, the film already had a sizeable collection of grungy NYC art heroes on-hand even without Burroughs’s involvement, and it has thus maintained a small cult-cinema legacy as a major milestone in the No Wave movement. It also proved to be the last collaboration between Beth & Scott B, who broke up their cheekily named B Movies production team after staging their biggest project to date. Beth B continued to direct confrontational underground art in the video sphere, most notably in 1991’s Stigmata and 1996’s Visiting Desire. Scott B went the safer route by picking up professional work directing made-for-cable documentaries for outlets like The Discovery Channel. As collaborators, Vortex was quite literally The Bs going for broke, and it broke them (to the point where Vortex is often cited as the official end of No Wave cinema, with the more famous titles referenced above considered to fall outside of the official canon). It’s both amusing to see what a Big Swing major motion picture means in the context of such a deliberately small & disorganized art movement and frustrating that the final product isn’t slightly more coherent or poetic — stuck in a limbo between the two.

-Brandon Ledet