The hook for watching “Downtown 81,” and the only reason it exists today, is the presence of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The artist, who passed away in 1988, has achieved ever-growing levels of success posthumously, regularly name-checked as a muse by the most popular rappers alive while his work sells at record-setting prices (the drummer from Metallica sold one of Basquiat’s early works at auction in 2012 for $13 million). You can find his work on printed on T-shirts and skateboards, his life documented in memoirs and biographies. “Basquiat is big show business now,” critic and “Downtown 81” scribe Glenn O’Brien wrote in a catalogue essay published in 2013. “He’s got fans like Bob Marley’s got fans.”But this isn’t just about making money off the life of a dead artist. As O’Brien notes in an interview included on a recent DVD release of the film — an amateurishly constructed fairy tale starring downtown New York artists and musicians, mostly as themselves — there was also a motive of revenge. Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat” (1996), starring Jeffrey Wright as the titular artist, disappointed many for its insistence on placing the more human and complicated Basquiat within a clichéd narrative about the tortured life of a creative genius, not to mention Schnabel’s inclusion of himself as a major figure in Basquiat’s life, even hinting that he was a mentor. “I refuse to see that film,” the director Jim Jarmuch told The Hollywood Reporter. “I knew Jean-Michel and he was not friends with Julian. I like Julian very much, he’s a very generous guy, even if he is an egotistical character.”When Schnabel’s film was released, O’Brien began thinking again about the footage shot in 1980 for “Downtown 81” (it was originally called “New York Beat Movie”). It had never been finished due to unclear, at least to the public, financial difficulties with the producers. If there was a way to get the footage back, could something be done with it? Could the real Basquiat finally emerge on screen?So O’Brien and producer Maripol (artist, fashion designer, and former partner of “Downtown 81” director Edo Bertoglio, who was conspicuously absent during the film’s re-release) decided to patch the film together, using the footage that they shot and redubbing the dialogue, which had been lost during the film’s two-decade absence. (The poet and musician Saul Williams provides the voice of Basquiat.) Thankfully, any dialogue in the film is, like the thin plot, secondary. “Downtown 81” is more of a document than a film, and would have been just as enjoyable as a string of raw footage, without edits or any kind of noticeable structure. As it is today, the film shows Basquiat floating through the East Village — the old East Village, at a time when you could walk down Houston Street for blocks without seeing another soul — running into various characters along the way: former Warhol starlet Cookie Mueller; photographer and former CBGB doorperson Roberta Bayley; Fab 5 Freddy; most of the members of Blondie; and, in a strange coincidence, Michael Holman, who a decade later would collaborate with Julian Schnabel on writing, you guessed it, “Basquiat.”O’Brien claims that “Downtown 81” was supposed to counter Schnabel’s hero-artist portrayal of Basquiat. But in the decade since the film was completed — it premiered, finally, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 — the myth of the artist’s life, the myth that was reinforced by Schnabel in his film and since then by many others, has continued to flourish. The critic Christian Viveros-Fauné, in a piece for the Paris Review, sums up the problem, remarking that, in the all the mythologizing of Basquiat, from which the artist cannot be removed, “the canvases — despite their attractions — remain remarkably beside the point.”
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