Eric Mitchell's debut film, shot in Super 8, stars Mitchell, Anya Phillips, Patti Astor, and Duncan Smith among a crowd of hip "poseurs," talking sex, manners, and politics.

Sketched loosely, the narrative of Poe's first feature is as scrappy and paper-thin as its protagonist Rico, a self-styled loner in New York City circa 1976 who longs to inhabit the "New Wave" scene of mid-60s Paris. In Rico's day-to-day life as an unsuccessful photographer, he wearily searches for authentic connection-- even as he spouts the most inauthentic prose imaginable.

New York in the late 70s: the arch, anti-establishment energy of CBGBs punk spreads like a virus through the East Village art scene, with hipsters as likely to pick up a cheap Super-8 camera as a guitar or saxophone. A number of eager collaborations between filmmakers, musicians and performance artists are spawned, and a scene tagged No Wave evolves, with the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Lizzie Borden and Susan Seidelman emerging from it. On into the 80s, and contempt for Reaganite conservatism inspires Nick Zedd's Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, proposing, among other things, 'to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men'. The likes of Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and Casandra Stark enthusiastically sign up. Celine Danhier's authoritative, thorough account of post-punk underground filmmaking in NYC celebrates a time and place where there were no rules, and where artists were encouraged and supported by their peers, those peers being, essentially, their audience. Contributions from key players are numerous and fascinating, as are the clips from the seminal, hugely influential work they produced. Michael Hayden

A “sci-fi povera” film shot on Super 8, Men in Orbit features musician Lurie and Eric Mitchell as chain-smoking astronauts in a decrepit New York living room that has been transformed into a spacecraft.