Content Warnings
French filmmaker and artist Marion Scemama presents four rarely-screened films recorded in 1980s New York. During this time, she was part of the Downtown art scene and formed a close artistic and personal bond with David Wojnarowicz, the political artist, painter, writer, performer, and photographer who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1992.
Scemama arrived in New York in 1981, planning a short stay that stretched into years. In 1983, she discovered Pier 34—an abandoned industrial building that Wojnarowicz and other artists had transformed into a radical, unsanctioned space for artistic and social experimentation, cruising, and partying. Inspired by its unruly energy, Scemama began shooting Relax Be Cruel, a fiction film about a punk squatter girl drifting through the Pier’s alternative world. Wojnarowicz’s murals appear in the background—perhaps their first unspoken collaboration.
The pair met in 1984, sparking a deep friendship that led to periods of intense artistic collaboration until his death. Across photography and video, their raw, intimate works confronted power, poverty, homophobia, and the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Rooted in Wojnarowicz’s lived experience, they pulse with rage and resistance, intertwined with a hunger for life, pleasure, and freedom. His art and life were inseparable. As Scemama recalls: “I had this camera that wasn’t just an object but an extension of David’s mind through my eyes and my arm… a way of pushing away the growing feeling of death surrounding us”.
Across the four works, each distinct in form, a portrait emerges of a defining era and a transformative friendship. ~ Christina Demetriou
Relax Be Cruel
Shot in 1983, Relax Be Cruel is a seminal document of the Pier 34 warehouse project in New York. Demolished shortly after filming, the space became emblematic of the liberatory promise of the countercultural arts scene of 80s NYC, whose legacy ran parallel to the emergent AIDS crisis and the phenomenon of expanding gentrification. This newly retrieved and re-edited hybrid fiction film follows a punk artist in need of housing as she cruises the dilapidated space, encountering art and sexuality through holes in the walls and cascading beams of light and shadow.
When I Put My Hands on Your Body
One night, David talks to me about his nostalgia for men’s bodies and his erotic dreams; the beauty of gestures, the sensuality of a man’s mouth on another man’s body. He makes me read a text that he has just written, “when I put my hands on your body, it is the whole history of your body that I feel…”.
If I Had a Dollar to Spend
Footage captured from David Wojnarowicz’ performance at the King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, NYC, May 1989.
Summer 89’
In the summer of 1989 Marion, David and François Pain took a camera with them to the Adirondacks lakes region of New York State. Passing it from hand to hand they captured a video diary of a vacation spent together in freedom, creativity, love and melancholy.
