Scott B and Beth B (also known as Scott and Beth B, Beth and Scott B or The Bs after B Movies) were among the best-known New York No Wave underground film makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
Scott B | |
|---|---|
| Born | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Scott Billingsley |
| Occupation | Film director, producer, screenwriter |
| Known for | No Wave, Colab |
Beth B | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1955-04-14) April 14, 1955 (age 67) New York City, New York, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Film director, producer, screenwriter |
| Known for | No Wave |
They went on to form an independent film production company called B Movies (a pun on B movies), which made the feature film Vortex on 16-mm film, starring Lydia Lunch (of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) with James Russo, Bill Rice, Haoui Montaug, Richard Prince, Brent Collins, and Ann Magnuson, among others.[8] Beth B is the daughter of painter Ida Applebroog, who has collaborated on two of her films.[9]
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Scott B and Beth B were among the most significant proponents of the punk bohemia, No Wave, no-budget style of underground punk filmmaking that was concerned with issues of simulation typical of postmodernism. Beth studied art at the School of Visual Arts and Scott was an exhibiting sculptor.[10] They married and became associated with Colab (Collaborative Projects) and worked out of New York City's East Village area in conjunction with performance artists and noise musicians. They created a series of noisy, scruffy, deeply personal short Super 8 mm films in which they combined violent themes and darkly sinister images to explore the manner in which the individual is constrained by society.[11]
The Bs' 8mm films were full of downtown obsessions: terror politics, torture, sexual domination and submission, and punk rock music. The brief length of these films allows them to effectively assault the viewer in a hit-and-run, belt-in-the-gut manner. They would cast musicians and other popular downtown personalities in their films. The Bs cleverly used the scene's social energy with weekly film shoots that were quickly edited and then screened as film serial episodes at music clubs such as the Mudd Club and Max's Kansas City. These films are at once contemplative and confrontational, penetrating and politically loaded. Films like this are virtually impossible to criticize because they glory in carefully DIY style of simulated amateurism.
In G-Man, Scott B and Beth B attack society's power structures as they depict a cop who feels compelled to employ a dominatrix. No Wave Cinema maker and artist James Nares appears in it, among others. It developed out of the short video NYPD Arson and Explosions vs. FALN that was part of the Colab project of weekly aired television programs on cable called All Color News.[10]
Black Box is the name of a torture contraption that was devised in the United States and used in foreign nations. In Black Box, a man played by Bob Mason is imprisoned in one such box, where he is tortured and the viewer endures his suffering. Black Box encapsulate all the Bs' major themes: crime, mind control, and sexual repression with the "minimal perfect-build" aesthetic of the man-sized vibrating containers Scott produced in his 1975 sculptor days. The plot is simple: a passive innocent leaves his tawdry room, neon Big Brother sign blinking ominously through the window, Mission: Impossible flickering on the TV, and amorous girlfriend draped across the bed, to be kidnapped Patty Hearst-style by a gang of punk thought-police. Menaced by an ogreish mad scientist, stripped, hung upside down, and tormented by surly, "shut up and suffer", Lydia Lunch, the passive innocent is finally crammed into the dread refrigerator, where he, and we, are bombarded by a 10-minute crescendo of sound and light.[12] Appearing in Black Box is Bob Mason (the hostage), Kiki Smith, Lydia Lunch, Christof Kohlhofer, Harvey Robbins, and Ulli Rimkus. According to film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Black Box is a "terrifying allegory of societal restriction of the individual."[13]
The Offenders, also shot in Super 8 mm, is a punk savage satire about a kidnapping. The Offenders was originally presented as a series of serial screenings at Max's Kansas City[12] and the Mudd Club.[14] Appearing in The Offenders is John Lurie, G. H. Hovagimyan, Scott B, Judy Nylon, art critic Edit DeAk, and Lydia Lunch, among others. The full version was shown at Film Forum and other film houses during the height of the New York City crime wave.[15]
Vortex, shot in 16 mm and made for $70,000 thanks to a National Endowment for the Arts grant via Colab,[16] is a film noirish drama featuring frequent collaborator Lydia Lunch as a detective who becomes immersed in corporate chicanery and the exploitation of politicians by companies soliciting defense contracts. The soundtrack for Vortex contains noise music by Richard Edson, Lydia Lunch, Adele Bertei, Kristian Hoffman, and The Bs. Vortex has been called the last No Wave film made.[15]