Cheryl Dunn's Moments Like This Never Last is showing exclusively on MUBI starting November 6, 2021 in many countries in the series Portrait of the Artist.
The seeds of this film came about through a discussion with Dash’s friends about protecting his story. Two years after he passed people were coming around downtown New York asking shooters and friends if they had any footage of Dash because they were making a film about him. I did not know these people and neither did anyone else here. I had seen this happen before, someone comes from the outside to make a film about a scene, a place that they had nothing to do with, which is fine sometimes but in this case I didn’t think so.
This film is about community, it’s about a close-knit family of friends that found each other in post-9/11 downtown NYC when there was a mass exodus and the art kids were left to run wild. I filmed the streets and the goings-on pretty consistently that year. My loft where I lived and worked was one block away from the World Trade Center. Mine and so many New Yorkers’ lives were turned upside down, in turn. People made art, music, and had dance parties everywhere. All of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s previously enacted “quality of life” laws went out the window. The cops didn’t care. They had bigger fish to fry. There was a “take back the streets” mentality that took effect for just a period of time, and what a glorious time it was.
It was super rewarding to use my archive to tell this story along with Dash’s art and the art of his friends. I love exploring the relationship of context to art that is created within that context. Dash’s art definitively represented the energy and feeling of NYC and the country at the turn of the last century.
My journey was long and winding, navigating egos and hidden emotions that were never allowed to surface. We kept digging as if on a treasure hunt to whittle this story down to the core, his core. The aim was to never depart from his image/voice or art for more than a few minutes. I set out to present his version of his story as much as possible.
When I was looking for my third editor, I asked ten possible candidates to write me a treatment. My talented friend and editor Gabriele Wrye wrote this eloquent essay on how he saw the film:
“Growing up in the beautifully fucked up Manhattan, before Giuliani and the broken window war, before Disney sanitized 42nd Street of prostitutes and pornographers, before lower Manhattan turned into a shopping mall, chaos came naturally. Dash Snowrevelled in the fraying social fabric of 80s New York and fought capricious authority at home, at the ‘juvi’ institution he was locked up in, and on the streets. In a jeremiad of graffiti, trash assemblages, un-photoshopable polaroids, cum-stained headlines, collage and feral rituals archived on Super 8 , Dash celebrated creation, destruction and the marginalized, striking out at the social pasteurization and criminalization of nonconformity happening all around him. “He was a bull born into the China shop, rejecting the trappings of privilege for freedom, a force of nature refusing to play nice. He took what he found, and like a hurricane rearranging the landscape. “Everyone says it: Dash Snow’s life was his art. His story is not an art scene story or a downtown story, but a personal story of someone who ate, slept, shit, pissed and jerked off anarchy. He vandalized the façade. He fought convention not for affect, but for survival. As the bandwidth of acceptable behavior in late capitalism narrowed he seemed to become more and more aware that being a punk who broke the rules was a political act. “Born into one of the most important American art families whom he rejected and was rejected by, he found a new family in the artists of post-9/11 lower Manhattan. He started the take-over by writing his name all-city as a young graffiti artist and subsequently becoming an accidental international art star. High stakes, drugs, and the pressure to keep producing took its toll, becoming a cautionary tale. The film collectively portrays the super moving journey of his realization and alienation and creates an experience as universal and heartbreaking as witnessing childhood’s end and as important as asking why does it have to.”