# Nick Zedd

Nick Zedd (né James Franklyn Harding III; January 25, 1956 – February 27, 2022) was an American filmmaker, author, and painter based in Mexico City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work. These filmmakers and artistic collaborators included Richard Kern, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Lung Leg, Kembra Pfahler, Jack Smith and Lydia Lunch. Under numerous pen names, Zedd edited and wrote the Underground Film Bulletin (1984–1990) which publicized the work of these filmmakers. The Cinema of Transgression was explored in Jack Sargeant's book Deathtripping.

## Early life

Zedd was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, on January 25, 1956. Zedd moved to New York in 1976 to study at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts.

## Career

Zedd directed several super-low-budget feature-length movies, including They Eat Scum, Geek Maggot Bingo, War Is Menstrual Envy and numerous short films. With Jen Miller, he was a co-creator of the public access series Electra Elf (2004–08), featuring New York artists and performers including Miller, Faceboy and Andrew J. Lederer. He served as director of photography on another TV series called Chop Chop (2007), produced by Nate Hill.
Additionally, Zedd acted in such low-budget movies as the Super 8 film Manhattan Love Suicides (1985), What About Me (1993), Bubblegum (1995), Jonas in the Desert (1997), Terror Firmer (1999), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001). He also appeared in the documentaries Llik Your Idols (2007) and Blank City (2010).
Zedd is the author of two autobiographical books, Bleed: Part One (1992) and Totem of the Depraved (1997), as well as the self-published novel From Entropy to Ecstasy (1996). He also contributed to the anthologies Up Is Up But So Is Down, Captured and Low Rent. In the 1980s Zedd published ten issues of the Underground Film Bulletin, a zine intended to promote the Cinema of Transgression. Issue 4 contained the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, which was also published in The Theory of Xenomorphosis (1998).
In the early 1990s, Zedd toured with Lisa Crystal Carver's Suckdog Circus, exhibiting his films. Performing with experimental noise music band Zyklon Beatles, Zedd released the "Consume and Die" 7-inch single on Rubric Records in 2000.
After exhibiting oil paintings in 2010 at the ADA and Pendu galleries, Zedd presented a major retrospective of films, videos, and paintings at the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn.
In 2012, he attended a retrospective of his films at the eighth Berlin International Directors Lounge and exhibited work at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in the same city.
In 2013, Zedd published The Extremist Manifesto, an essay denouncing contemporary art and the class structure that promotes it while announcing the emergence of the Extremist Art movement in Mexico City, which sought to subvert the edicts of established art institutions and curatorial ideologues. This manifesto, first released online, then in a self-published Hatred of Capitalism magazine issued in Mexico City (in English and Spanish) was reprinted a year later by the Museo Universitario del Chopo, along with two more issues as part of the Fanzinoteka exhibition. At a screening at the New Museum in New York, Zedd was presented with the Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement, a tribute given to "members of the avant garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways".
In 2014, Zedd exhibited three motion pictures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of a posthumous retrospective of films by Christoph Schlingensief, who had cited Zedd as a major influence on his work. Later in 2014, Zedd presented his first public exhibition of paintings in Mexico City, in a group show curated by Aldo Flores at Salon des Aztecas Gallery in Coyoacán. In 2015, Zedd presented his first one-man show of paintings at the V&S Gallery in Mexico City. Zedd also shot an 8mm short entitled Paradise Lost, which was featured in the anthology film Impression X (2023).

## Personal life and death

An outsider artist throughout his life, Zedd never enjoyed commercial success with his films. By the mid-1980s, he regularly resorted to side hustles (such as being a taxi driver), to make ends meet. Peter LeVasseur, Zedd's acquaintance at the time and a former East Village squatter, suggests that he contracted hepatitis C, during that period, from intravenous drug use. "It had to be from intravenous drug use," LeVasseur says. "He seemed to be on heroin and coke — both were fashionable at the time, the combo. This was when he was at his deepest, worst part. The pallor, his eyes and sunken cheeks. If you got in his car you’d be afraid".
Zedd died from complications from cirrhosis of the liver, cancer, and hepatitis C, in Mexico City, on February 27, 2022, at the age of 63. He was survived by his partner of 15 years, Monica Casanova, as well as a son and a step-daughter.

## Legacy

Founder of the Cinema of Transgression movement and part of the late 1970s and early 1980s No Wave group of underground filmmakers in New York City’s Lower East Side, Zedd exerted a significant influence over a number of directors, from Christoph Schlingensief to Quentin Tarantino. The latter paid tribute to him in his Palme d'Or-winning film, Pulp Fiction (1994), naming the main antagonist of the "Gold Watch" chapter Zed [sic].
The Canadian electronic music duo Zeds Dead took their name from the famous dialogue between Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) and Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) in Tarantino's film, where he reveals to her that "Zed's dead".
Legendary cult filmmaker John Waters, who was as much a fan of Zedd's lurid and provocative style, as Zedd was of his camp classics, like Pink Flamingos, wrote: "Nick Zedd makes violent, perverted art films from Hell—he’s my kind of director!", and he considered the title of his debut film, They Eat Scum, as his favorite in cinema history. Similarly, fellow-East Village independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch said that "Nick Zedd’s films are legendary — he is a truly seminal figure in the New York underground".

## Filmography

* They Eat Scum (1979)
* The Bogus Man (1980), short
* Geek Maggot Bingo (1983)
* The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983), short
* Totem of the Depraved (1983), short, co-directed with Ela Troyano
* Thrust in Me (1984), short featured in Manhattan Love Suicides (1985)
* School of Shame (1984)
* Kiss Me Goodbye (1986), short
* Go to Hell (1986), short
* Police State (1987), short
* Whoregasm (1988), short
* War Is Menstrual Envy (1992)
* Smiling Faces Tell Lies (1995), short
* Why Do You Exist (1998)
* Tom Thumb in the Land of the Giants (1999), short
* Ecstasy in Entropy (1999), short
* Abnormal: The Sinema of Nick Zedd (2001), video
* I of K9 (2001), short
* Elf Panties: The Movie (2001), video
* Lord of the Cockrings (2001), video
* Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001), co-directed with Jon Vomit
* I Was a Quality of Life Violation (2002), short
* Electra Elf: Dance With the Devil (2003)
* Electra Elf: Maggot on a Hot Tin Roof (2003)
* Electra Elf: Old Man & the Sea Monkey (2003)
* Electra Elf: Great Shrunken Expectations (2004)
* Electra Elf: Roof Party (2004)
* Electra Elf: I, Nauseous (2004)
* Electra Elf: Hellbound Heiresses (2004)
* Electra Elf: Deadly Little Trees (2005)
* Electra Elf: Triumph of the Ill (2005)
* Electra Elf: Of Lice and Men (2005)
* Electra Elf: The Beginning Parts One & Two (2005), video
* Electra Elf: Don't Worry Bee Happy (2006)
* Electra Elf: Vile Buddies (2006)
* Electra Elf: Battle of the Bands (2006)
* Electra Elf: No Plague Like Home (2007)
* Filthy Rich (2007)
* Electra Elf: We All Scream for Ice Cream (2007)
* Electra Elf: Behind the Scenes (2007)
* Mistakes Hapen (2007)
* Electra Elf: Hollow Be Thy Name (2007)
* Electra Elf: Goin to the Chapel (2007)
* Electra Elf: Gone with the Mind (2008)
* NYC/MEXICO (2011)
* The Birth of Zerak (2011), short documentary
* Paintings 2009-11 (2011)
* Frustration/Dr. Shinto (2011)
* Cockfight (2012)
* El Manifiesto Extremista (2013)
* Demonic Sweaters: Love Always Love (2014), music video
* The Death of Muffinhead (2016), short
* Attack of the Particle Disruptors (2016), short
* Demonica (2017), short
* Eclipse of the Ectoparasite (2017), short
* Werewolf Bitches from Outer Space (2017), additional scenes director
* Vive Libre (I'm Not Afraid of You) (2018), music video for Los Congoleños
* The Reckoning (2019)
* Impression X (2023), segment "Paradise Lost"