Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981).
Zoë Lund produced a small body of work, died young, and became a saint. Her intensity, beauty, and premature death at 37 have given her a Rimbaudian aura, inspiring tragic adoration. In this she is not unique. But while beauty and tragedy may provide the materials for enduring fame, for Lund, at least, the resulting hagiography risks obscuring the work of a singular mind. The films, documents, and writing she left behind reveal a figure who was at once a dedicated artist and a political militant, a creator of indelible artworks who seldom saw her projects realized.
In the years between her screen debut in 1981 and her death in 1999, Lund (née Tamerlis) contributed essential pieces to two widely recognized cinematic classics: her lead performance in Ms .45 (1981) and at least part of the script for Bad Lieutenant (1992), both directed by Abel Ferrara.1 Although her films with Ferrara remain her finest, her other work—more acting and screenwriting, along with unmade films and unpublished writing—are evidence of a project that seems at once barely begun and fully formed. Lund’s acting, writing, and directing display not just remarkable thematic coherence, but also a singular aesthetic, political, and spiritual vision. The scarce realizations of that vision invite speculation as to what might have been, but such speculation need not be idle. Indeed, a careful look at Lund’s work—both the masterworks and the scraps—reveals her profound meditation on the political meaning of violence and self-transformation, a constant assault on a brutal and exploitative society through art. The works and the ephemera we are left with confirm Lund as one of the great chroniclers of modern psychological rapaciousness.
Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981).
Her first role remains her best known. In Ferrara’s Ms .45, Lund plays Thana, a mute seamstress, whose sleazy boss spends his days harassing her and her coworkers. She takes revenge on the men of New York after being sexually assaulted twice in a single commute home from work. Her silent facial acting is masterful, rightfully cementing her legacy as a singular performer. At times, her youth (Lund was only eighteen at the time) hardens into a singular, obsessive drive befitting Thana’s name, which evokes the Greek god of death. Her trembling face at the film’s beginning expresses a depth of pain no scream could conjure. Elsewhere, a murderous desire comes to the fore in the way she cocks her jaw slightly while her boss condescends to her.
If the film has come to be seen as a feminist classic, it's largely thanks to Lund's performance, which dramatizes the violent interplay between male desire and female vulnerability.2 In getting her revenge on men—not just on the ones who attacked her—Thana becomes a projective screen of male desire. Her nightly hunts are built around performances, each accompanied by a stunning outfit, that get her close to different sorts of men so she can dispatch them. She does what it takes to pick up her prey. If she needs to be shy and helpless, she is; a quiet listener, she becomes one; a sex worker, she makes them open their wallet. The entire film revolves around turning her vulnerability—sometimes real, sometimes feigned, more often both at once—into a lure. Even while objectifying herself, she retains control of the means of desire's production. This turns out to be typical for Lund, who plays this unnaturalness rather naturally. There is something knowing in the way she carries her character through extreme changes to her person. We do not just watch her act; she forces us to see for whom she is acting.
Special Effects (Larry Cohen, 1984).
Following Ms .45, Lund starred in Special Effects (1984), directed by Larry Cohen, a messy downtown Vertigo (1958). Lund plays Andrea, a Texas girl stuck doing nude shoots on 42nd Street who meets a burnt-out Hollywood director looking for something. He finds it by murdering Andrea and filming the killing to use in a movie. Lund later reappears as the thickly accented Elaine Bernstein from the Upper West Side, who is cast to play the murdered actress. We encounter Lund, as Andrea, as an object—she first appears standing nude as men with cameras pay to take photos. As Elaine, Lund is shocking for the way she flaunts her relationship to a camera in real time. She plays up a giddy reticence (“Who do I be? This?! That?!”) before settling into a winking passivity that draws in the men around her. Here, the stylized, performative femininity of Ms .45 is made literal. When Elaine stands before the movie camera, Lund makes a drama of her objectification.
Even in her most disappointing roles Lund was an irresistible presence. Her appearance as a cabaret dancer is the most compelling part of Temistocles López’s Exquisite Corpses (1989), which otherwise lacks structure. She dons a new personality with each scene, but her theatrical display gains little traction amid the film’s haphazard plotting and direction. Still, as ever, she played up the contradiction between her expressive, expansive mouth and the apparent frailty of her body, moving with a sense of brash confidence amid mortal danger, which her body picked up and her face transmitted like a radio antenna.
Although as an actor Lund didn’t get far from the rather confined milieu of these downtown genre movies, she thoroughly crafted each role in her own image. Her characters—most often actors and performers themselves—tear along the seams, multiplying themselves in the act of attracting those who would exploit them. Lund’s interest, though, was not performativity as such or the constructed nature of identity. There is an essential connection between rapid shifts of identity and exposure to violence—such self-transformations are responses to destruction. Lund viewed radical self-creation in the face of a violent world as an artistic, even ethical mandate. This fundamental commitment animates all her work, not just her acting roles. The ability to take on—and to be the agent of—such changes moves us from exposure and exploitation to a higher moral plane or the possibility of, as she might put it, revolution.
Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992).
This commitment finds perhaps its most distilled expression in Lund’s script for Bad Lieutenant. LT, the titular lieutenant, played by Harvey Keitel, is a crooked cop involved in every vice his position affords him. Lund has a brief role as his heroin dealer. As she’s shooting him up, she is a spectral presence, her voice seeming to float out of her: “Vampires have it easy. They feed on others. . . . We have to eat away at ourselves 'til there's nothing left but appetite.” It’s one of the bleakest expressions of the rabid society LT serves and protects. The speech occasions his pivotal conversion in the next scene, in which Christ appears before him, and after which the wretched system LT fed off of appears in a mirrored form: he spares two rapists, forgiven by the victim for their crime but still wanted by the police, not to enrich himself, but to serve a higher moral code of forgiveness. This possibility of justice, however odd it seems, gives Lund’s vision a political edge. In writing LT’s conversion, Lund gestures at the soul-rending changes needed to overturn a crooked moral order.
Not all of Lund’s conversions take such dramatic—or religious—form. She was fixated on the image of a character walking out of a theater; this seemingly mundane activity is the essential instance of transformation in her filmmaking, marking the inversion of fiction into reality. It first appears in the screenplay for her unproduced feature Free Will and Testament, which she wrote in the 1980s and early ’90s. Though Lund called it her masterpiece, she was never able to get it made. The screenplay, a blend of thriller, heist film, agitprop, and romance, is about a cell of radicals trying to assassinate a US-backed dictator in Central America. Largely concerned with debates about the role of revolutionary violence, Free Will ends with a decisive, explosive act that seems to answer the political questions it poses. Then, all the characters we’ve been watching walk out of a theater whose marquee reads “Free Will and Testament.” The last lines of the screenplay read “The story is not over, the drama is ever to be done, on—and off—the screen.” This final scene is a metafictional touch in a screenplay otherwise so dismissive of the media and so invested in the meaning of real, violent political action. Actors leave the theater to continue the revolution elsewhere.
Hot Ticket (Zoë Lund, 1993).
The same basic scenario appears again in the only film Lund managed to direct, a 101-second short, Hot Ticket (1993), the restoration of which has occasioned a complete retrospective of her film works at Anthology Film Archives. The short was made as part of an omnibus film commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which prompted respondents to “describe in one scene why it is important to make films, especially now.” Lund ran with the premise. The film begins as expected, as she introduces herself in a bathroom mirror: “I’m Zoë Lund, writer and actress.” It then fades to black as she leaves a red theater lobby, looking suddenly disheveled and holding a hat. After a cut, we find her outside, now well-coiffed and wearing the hat as she approaches the box office. Instead of using money, she buys one ticket with a hypodermic needle filled with blood before asking, “Am I too late?” to which the vendor replies, “No. You just made it. You can go in now.” Instead, she nervously, or perhaps curiously, walks onto the sidewalk, as Lund says in voice-over, “That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is.” Distraught, she hesitantly picks a direction, seemingly at random. The camera holds as she stops and looks back twice before finally disappearing down the street.
What is she walking toward? Nicole Brenez writes that in Hot Ticket, “the inversion between theatre and world is not just a neat twist. It signifies a revolution.” Lund, it seems, is taking the first step toward a new society, “that which ought to be.” Perhaps, but the movement here is subtle. In the opening scene in the bathroom, Lund, a native New Yorker, introduces herself in a light but unmistakably Germanic accent (though when she purchases her ticket she has a somewhat British accent). The affectation suggests that this introduction is part of the film itself, so perhaps Lund’s exit is as a character, and Brenez underemphasizes the importance of Lund’s role as an actor in this inversion. Her revolution requires the imprimatur of a fiction to carry it into the world. Call it Lund’s anti-Orphic philosophy. The actor leaves the theater and descends into the night, into the desolation around them. It is the actor’s art to carry the audience with them and, like LT before Christ, bring us face to face with the terror of our time. Like Orpheus, Lund pauses and looks back, but unlike Eurydice, we are not trapped by her gaze. It requires an act of will to follow her; not just a transformation of the self but transformation by the self.
We can draw a line through the transforming figures that populate Lund’s work—performers, LT, political radicals—to this act of leaving the theater. At this limit, Lund’s aesthetics blur into politics: an extreme, subjective commitment to overturning oneself to overturn society. Art was Lund’s chief means for confronting the world; she had an admirable optimism toward art’s power to change it. She challenged the audience to be transformed in the way her characters were, a step most would not take. No wonder lone killers, radicals, and zealous converts, rather than traditional mass political subjects like “the people” or “the working class,” run through her work. Perhaps she lived this philosophy only in her slight, vivacious body of work. In many ways, it seems like the last gasp of a form of spiritualized, politically engaged artistry that first died with Pasolini, one not destined to survive the ravages of neoliberalism. The decline of the global left in the ’80s and ’90s and the increasing commercialization of the culture industry effectively foreclosed the development of such figures. Confronting such a depraved world was a courageous, necessary act on Lund’s part—and remains one. It takes fortitude to walk into hell, but to paraphrase a line from Exquisite Corpses, hell is an important place to be.
- Since the film’s release, there has been some controversy over the script’s authorship. Lund and Ferrara are credited as cowriters. However, Jonas Mekas later claimed that Lund’s boyfriend, Edouard de Laurot, was the chief writer. Lund and her husband, Robert, both maintained that she had been the chief author. ↩
- The most comprehensive analysis of Ms .45 remains Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s eponymous book (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2017). ↩