Salvation!: Have You Said Your Prayers Today? (Beth B, 1987).
Across five decades, artist and filmmaker Beth B has produced a dazzlingly diverse body of work, spanning cinema, television, installation art, and performance. She made her name as a pioneer of No Wave, a movement that emerged during a legendary period of subcultural creativity in New York. In the late 1970s, when B graduated from the School of Visual Arts, musicians, artists, and filmmakers were finding their place in the bankrupt city. In the vacant lots and crumbling apartments of downtown Manhattan, an outsider community emerged, a loosely affiliated group of misfits connected by their overlapping social circles, fierce creativity, and raw, anti-everything attitude. This proximity fostered an explosion of collaborative artmaking, within which B played a central role. Alongside her then partner, Scott B, she made a series of Super 8 and 16mm experiments, which they called “B Movies,” that exemplified what would become defining No Wave traits: a resourceful DIY spirit, nihilistic politics, and a fluid, cross-medium approach.
The enduring appeal and influence of No Wave, a movement which spawned an array of cult heroes—Nan Goldin, Jim Jarmusch, Kim Gordon, Lizzie Borden, and many more—makes it hard to look beyond this historical association. B played a crucial role in developing a look, sound, and philosophy that would become irrevocably linked to a certain time and place, although she now regards that moment with ambivalence.
“No Wave was five years of my life, but I’m done with that,” B tells me when we meet for our first conversation in August. “I’ve had 40 years of solo independent filmmaking and I hate to be defined by past attachments.” Yet B knows that while she’d like to move on, this is a connection that she will likely never shake off: these days, she wryly describes her current practice as “now wave,” a label that acknowledges the ways in which her past inevitably shapes her creative present.
B and I are sitting on the lush grounds of Silent Green in Berlin-Wedding, the former crematorium turned cultural center that hosted a ten-day program celebrating the artist’s work. Now Wave: Beth B Glowing builds upon other revisionist retrospectives in Rotterdam and New York, which have sought to acknowledge the longevity and variety of B’s practice. In Berlin, a cinematic retrospective was accompanied by an exhibition of new video installations and a series of performances featuring B’s regular collaborators.
The program offers a dazzling overview of an artist who is constantly embracing new mediums and styles, but whose work has remained thematically consistent. From the beginning, B has made unnerving, uncomfortable films that explore the darkest corners of human experience: societal dysfunction, state control, alienation, and trauma, taking special interest in questions of gender and sexuality. In the early “B Movie” Black Box (1978), starring Lydia Lunch and Bob Mason, a young man is kidnapped by leather-clad sadists and forced to undergo sensual torture, illustrated on screen by several painful minutes of blinding light and cacophonous sound (the film was inspired by a real torture device, invented in Houston, which was reportedly used on prisoners by US-backed dictatorships in Latin America). In Letters to Dad (1979), several No Wave peers—including Vivienne Dick, Kiki Smith, and Pat Place—read real letters addressed to a father figure who is later revealed to be cult leader Jim Jones. The shock tactics and dark humor of these early films speak to the abrasive confidence of a young artist with nothing to lose, raging at the world around her and with no interest in being accepted by the art world or mainstream society.
Stills from Letters to Dad (Beth B, 1979).
This spirit of provocation continued into the filmmaker’s post–No Wave output. With the banned-from-MTV music promo The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (1984) and feature-length religious satire Salvation!: Have You Said Your Prayers Today? (1987), B took an aesthetic left turn, appropriating the brash glamor of 1980s pop culture—big hair, neon lights, leather and lace—and coupling that self-conscious style with a subversive critique of sexuality, religion, and Reaganite neoconservatism.
Salvation! is particularly daring, a brash musical melodrama centering on a megalomaniacal televangelist (Stephen McHattie), who is blackmailed by a brutish factory worker (Viggo Mortensen, in an early role), his pious wife (Exene Cervenka), and her sister (Dominique Davalos). Stylish, violent, and hilarious (“You can’t blackmail Jesus!” the reverend memorably cries), Salvation! revels in an excess which matches the larger-than-life source material. It was also ahead of its time, preempting forthcoming church corruption scandals (it premiered a few months before the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart stories broke), and it anticipates radical Christianity’s increasing stranglehold on US politics. Contemporary critics and audiences were largely baffled, as demonstrated by a recently released recording of the Q&A that followed the film’s 1987 Berlinale premiere. In this lively recording, B is quizzed by belligerent audience members confused by her seductive MTV-style visuals and skeptical of her claims to be inspired by reality. “This is not crazy, what you saw—it’s real!” B repeatedly insists, to audible disbelief.
After Salvation!, B made a second feature, Two Small Bodies (1993), which distills a potent critique of gendered power relations into a series of conversations between a single mother and a male detective who believes she has killed her children. An adaptation of Neal Bell’s play, itself inspired by a true story, the film explores perceptions of female sexual morality and victim-blaming—again very prescient, as B plays with tropes still central to the true-crime genre.
In the past three decades, B has mostly made low-budget documentaries, including several explorations of subcultures that have since entered more mainstream conversations—drag in High Heel Nights (1993), BDSM and queer sexuality in Visiting Desire (1995), and burlesque in Exposed (2013). Two biographical profiles, Call Her Applebroog (2016) and Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2020), offer revisionist portraits of often underestimated female artists. Here B chooses to focus on women whose stories intersect with her own—Ida Applebroog was both a celebrated artist and B’s mother; Lunch has been a frequent collaborator since the No Wave days.
In these later documentaries and in her recent installation work—such as the multi-stranded video project Glowing (2024), which is made up of a series of intimate conversations with fellow underground artists from different generations—B seems to be processing her own history. When we meet for a second conversation a few weeks after the end of the Now Wave exhibition, B acknowledges this sense of resolution. “At Silent Green I felt like my past, present, and future were all there together; that was a revelation,” she explains. “I could see how I had continued to work through these ideas of control and submission from my early work. But now, instead of provoking the audience with violence, I can create something that is deeper, but still dealing with hard-hitting subjects.”
B’s most recent films share the fearless directness which made her 1970s and ’80s work so powerful. Yet, like all good artists, her practice has evolved over the decades. Beth B is still a force to be reckoned with, but she has also become more able to discern, and to capture, the shards of light that pierce the darkness. Perhaps this most furious of filmmakers has finally found a kind of relief: from violence to peace; from no to now.
Black Box (Beth B and Scott B, 1978).
NOTEBOOK: You first began making films as an art student in New York City in the mid-’70s. How did you arrive at filmmaking as your primary medium?
BETH B: When I was studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, I was frustrated with the limitations of fine art. I began to look at different mediums—photography, sculpture—I definitely did not do any painting! Then I started to venture into film. One piece that I did, called The Raw and the Cooked, combined a performance, a sculptural piece, and a film. In another, I asked people to talk about their sexuality. I had forgotten all about this until I started to do my archives. Suddenly I realized that I have been dealing with a lot of similar themes in my work from the start. Already, in the mid-’70s, I wanted to meld different aspects of art practice into an expression that could examine emotions, identity, and sexuality, and which might bring in voice, moving picture, and performance.
After graduating, there was such intense creativity in New York City, and I started going to clubs, hearing music I had never known existed—atonal, excruciating—feeling like it dug deep inside viscerally. That's what I was looking for. There were a lot of people at that time who were venturing outside of their artistic specializations, which really attracted me. I wanted to get away from the white cube, the preciousness of galleries. Clubs offered an exit and entrance for me. People would be drinking, screaming, reacting in an uncensored way. The first film I made, G-Man [1978], was a reflection of the world and of what was going on politically—the devastation of urban areas, the underrepresented, a sense of having no future.
NOTEBOOK: G-Man was your first collaboration with Scott B. How much were those early “B Movies” shaped by that unique creative and social context?
B: We weren't making it for a market; there was no idea of “success,” no “career.” We never even thought about those words. It was a bunch of young people who were unbolted, released from the ties that bound us to our families, to society’s norms, to tradition. There was this naïve sense of lawlessness; we were going to do whatever we wanted and change the world. New York City was the perfect playground because there was no money. It was just rubble, demolished buildings. People left their doors open. You’d walk along the street and meet people. It was friendly in a really alienated way.
For me, that scene was all about the excitement of going way out on the edge of what would be considered cinema or music. My first films were very experimental, but not in the realm of Stan Brakhage or Michael Snow. It was anti all of that. It was saying we can tell stories and we can inhabit human emotions within the work. That was radical at the time. I think that there were more women experimenting with that idea, with visceral expressions of emotions. There were like-minded women all doing very different work, but with this feeling of No one's going to fuck with me. No one's going to hold me back. I am going to do what I want to do.
NOTEBOOK: Questions of sex, power, and gender roles run through your career, right from those first No Wave films.
B: The films that Scott and I did were looking at women’s issues 90 percent of the time. These questions of sex and power run through it all, beginning with G-Man, going into Black Box [1978], and so on. I'm always flipping those roles, between male, female, and everyone in between. This gender boundary-breaking was in line with some of the musicians who I had become interested in: the women in Malaria!, Lydia Lunch, Cynthia Sley, Pat Place, Bush Tetras.
Another life-changing experience I should mention was while I was still at art school. I was sick of working as a waitress, so a friend of mine said, “Oh, I just got this job, and I think you'd be great at it.” It was being a phone girl at a brothel. I was so naïve. I came from Southern California; I didn't know about anything. It was, like, being the madam. I would take the calls and inhabit the different women in the ad: “I'm Kathy, I have double Ds, I’d love to have you come and cuddle them,” that sort of thing. I also learned the term dominatrix. I had never heard that before in my life. It was an extraordinary education in the dynamics of sex and this idea of transactional relationships. I learned about men who wanted to relinquish their power to be sexually dominated. I could never have imagined that. I became someone who was manipulating these men, selling them something. I managed the women, the money, the condoms, getting them out when their time was up. That was so informative, really the best education of my life.
The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (Beth B, 1984).
NOTEBOOK: The connection between music and film is very important to you, which also overlaps with the engagement with different subcultures we see across your work. The first film you made after you stopped collaborating with Scott B was The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight, which incorporates BDSM imagery. That lay the groundwork for Salvation!, which uses similar aesthetics to explore the entanglement of media, religion, sex, and politics.
B: In some ways, the No Wave scene promoted a sense of alienation and keeping walls up within oneself. When I made The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight, I wanted to shift that isolation, that sense of self-protection, of closing one's eyes to other possibilities. That music video was a celebration of womanhood and freedom.
Salvation! was inspired by media rumblings at the time about these right-wing televangelists. Although we didn’t call them megachurches back then, that was what they were building, and the evangelists were raking in money. They were seducing their audiences in a way that had not been done before, through televangelism, copying Mick Jagger’s moves to try to lure in the American youth through the television.
For research, I went to the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Superconference in Lynchburg with [the artist] Jenny Holzer. We both dressed in our cutest skirts, very conservative, like bad versions of a secretary. This conference was frightening because what I saw was the future. They had people, including myself, so frightened by the music and the imagery that when they said “get down on your knees,” I got down on my knees. You were squeezed into this massive church with thousands of people, and they kept saying, “Move closer together, closer together!” like they needed the room, but really it was so there was no way out.
I went home thinking that where there is big money and religion, there's also some fucked-up shit. That's where the script came from, which I worked on with Tom Robinson. It’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but within this religious framework. I just imagined the direction this religious fervor and money might take, and it became reality. After the film was released, there was the Jim and Tammy Bakker scandal—the blackmail, the sex, the mismanagement of money. Then others followed.
Salvation!: Have You Said Your Prayers Today? (Beth B, 1987).
NOTEBOOK: Practically how did you make the film? It’s low-budget, but it looks incredible, and the casting—Stephen McHattie, a young Viggo Mortensen, Dominique Davalos, and Exene Cervenka—is so striking.
B: The film was made for $80,000. I’m kind of blown [away] thinking about that now. We had a rough time because there was so little money, but we were able to interest this extraordinary cast. I really couldn’t find someone to play the reverend. One day I was watching Kojak, and I saw Stephen. I tracked him down and as soon as he shook my hand, I just knew. There were these vibrations going through his hand. I was thinking, he’s insane—handsome, an incredible actor, intelligent, everything! He really got into the research. He was checking out Jimmy Swaggart’s moves. You see them in his performance, towards the end of the film, although he does it much better than Swaggart.
Stephen’s agent suggested Viggo Mortensen, who hadn’t really been in anything yet. It was interesting with Viggo and Stephen, because they're very different actors. Viggo is more method and really wanted to improvise. There was one scene where there was just no stopping him and he almost drowned Stephen. In the scene we filmed at the Jersey Shore, Viggo was so wild, he dragged Stephen deep into the water. Truly frightening. Afterwards, Stephen was really pissed off. I love when the dynamics between the actors are different and you have to pull them together. Viggo wanted to do all his stunts; he was young.
I'd known Exene for years; I love the band X. I was really amazed by the way she was able to play these two characters, a heavy metal rockstar with this insane outfit, then also this sweet evangelist. I was shocked that she could bring that contrast and complexity. Dominique I knew because I cast her in The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.
NOTEBOOK: Now the film feels so prescient, given the influence of the evangelical movement on US politics and the rise of Trump. What was the reception like when you first released it?
B: When Salvation! was released, it was just before those televangelist scandals had broken, and it was really dismissed. It did not get good reviews. Thank goodness for Ulrich and Erika Gregor at the Berlin International Film Festival, who invited it to screen in Forum. I heard a recording recently of the Q&A from the premiere, and audience members keep saying it’s funny but it’s not real. I keep replying “It’s real! This is what is coming. It’s here already!” Salvation! is very violent and funny, and people didn’t really understand that correlation between horror and humor. The film was panned; I felt like I had fucked up.
I remember there was one review at the time asking, Why are these music videos in here? What is all this about religious heavy metal? At the time, [Christian heavy metal band] Stryper were already successful, so it was all there. I wanted to put across this idea that the future was going to be religion usurping the media, music videos, stardom, and consumption. That’s how people were going to view the world and ingest politics. A way to see the world which is totally false and curated. That’s been borne out with the rise of social media.
I showed it recently in New York, and the crowd were laughing and gasping. They got it, but it’s 36 years later! People were asking me how I knew. I don’t know, I just had this intuition. They were applauding, because this is what Trump, the conservatives, the Republicans, the religious right are saying. There are lines in the script where they talk about changing the constitution!That really surprised me, and I felt vindicated, in a way. I sat there in the audience laughing and gasping myself. It's tough, but it's also reality.
Two Small Bodies (Beth B, 1993).
NOTEBOOK: Two Small Bodies is another stylistic and formal departure, but it’s also a distillation of your key themes—control, sex, domination, gender dynamics, state power—encapsulated by this showdown between a man and a woman who represent opposing moralities.
B: I read the play Two Small Bodies by Neal Bell, and knew I had to make it. I thought it was extremely cinematic, with all the themes I was already grappling with. Salvation! had a very violent conflict between the sexes, and what I saw in Two Small Bodies was a journey shared by these two people who were on opposite sides of traditional modes of being. On the one hand, you have a single woman with two children, a cocktail hostess, very sexual, powerful, and independent. On the other is this masculine, dominant cop.
I wrote an adaptation, but I had no funding. Someone told me to send it to ZDF, the German television channel, and I put it in the post thinking I’d never hear back. It was crazy, I got a three-page letter saying they thought the film was brilliant. They fully financed it, for $200,000. That's how that film got made. It was really tough, though, because they said the only way we can give you these funds is if you film in Germany. The whole film was made in Germany with these two American actors. We tried to make it look American, but it didn't matter. It could have taken place on Mars. It’s a universal conflict.
NOTEBOOK: Two Small Bodies is still provocative, but it feels like a progression from the B Movies and Salvation!. Its perspective is less nihilistic and more empathetic somehow.
B: In Salvation!, the conflict is never resolved between any of the characters. It presents a contrary, vicious way of existing in the world: “I’ll fuck you before you fuck me.” In Two Small Bodies, both characters are forced to play out their conflict to a place of reconciliation. It is an extreme psychological drama, a brutal game of cat and mouse, but at the end they accept each other. Even though they fundamentally disagree about how to live their lives, catharsis takes place.
When I finished the film, I showed it to my mother, the artist Ida Applebroog, and she cried. She said, “Beth, this is about me.” I had no clue [why], but when we talked I realized what she meant. She had a mental break when I was thirteen, and left her four children and her husband for some time. I think there were so many women of that era who at a certain point needed to discover who they were. Women were not given the ability to do that because they were so dependent on male support. What I came to understand was that Two Small Bodies was autobiographical. I was not conscious of it, but the film put me in touch with the eternal struggle for women’s liberation. I was determined that I was never going to be like my mother. I would never get married, never have children. I had to reconcile with the idea that I'm not my mother. I can make decisions based on who I am, and I don’t want to perpetuate the cycle that has gone on with the women in my family. I was very fearful of that.
Exposed (Beth B, 2013).
NOTEBOOK: This idea around cycles of loss and intergenerational trauma is very apparent in your later documentaries, which are still uncompromising but more empathetic. How did this move into documentary come about?
B: My first documentary was Stigmata [1991], about substance abuse and recovery. That turned a switch on in my head to understand that people could go to the depths of despair and come back. A lot of it was excavating my own autobiography. Then I made a documentary that was about juvenile sex offenders called Voices Unheard [1998]. I wanted to understand why these young boys were abusing younger children. Ninety percent of them had been abused by their caretakers or parents or babysitters or neighbors.
Then I was unsuccessful in trying to raise money to make another film. I wrote scripts, tried again, no one would fund them. A friend helped me get a job directing documentaries at Court TV. It was extraordinary; I learned so much, and for the first time I was paid to direct the films I wanted to make. I worked in network television for eight years until I realized that the increased degree of corporate compromise and the move toward reality TV was not an option for me. I went back into the New York underground to make Exposed. It was like coming home, back to guerilla filmmaking, working alone with a tiny digital camera. It was so freeing to be untethered. Exposed follows eight performers who use their nakedness to transport us beyond the sexual and social taboos that our society holds dear. These cutting-edge performers are operating on the far edge of burlesque, using politics and satire to question the concept of “normal.” I chose my participants carefully and found myself on a journey into things that were stuck within myself.
Call Her Applebroog (Beth B, 2016).
NOTEBOOK: How much has your more recent work been a way to reconcile your own history, as a person and as an artist?
B: I’ve always been attracted to dark subjects because of my family. Call Her Applebroog was about my mother and also about myself. There were so many mysteries in my family, things we were forbidden to speak about, rules and behaviors to follow. What better way to examine my childhood confusion than to do a documentary about my mother? I got into territory that inevitably turns itself back onto myself.
Directing Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over was also definitely turning the clock backwards: looking back to no and then speeding into now. The ’70s were a formative time for me, and even though I don't identify with the rage I inhabited for many years, it was my training ground. At Silent Green, I programmed The War Is Never Over alongside Black Box, with a live performance from Lydia. In Black Box, Lydia is only nineteen years old, embodying this authority figure in a leather miniskirt and spiked heels. The documentary about Lydia goes deeper into the question of who she is beyond being an icon, her complexity and vulnerability.
My ultimate goal, which I’ve also begun to realize with the film series Glowing, is to create a circle of creative people to connect with. This draws me into the process and away from the result.... Is it a success? Will people like it? I love not having to think about this shit. It’s full circle to my youthful idealism when I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing; I just did it. It wasn't a choice, it was something burning inside. The struggle goes on until we’re dead, but we have the opportunity to ask, "Why was I put on this planet? Why is life so replete with struggle and pain?” I like to invite people who are in this quandary to sit next to someone who might feel the same way.