Marion Scemama: My name is Marion Scemama. I'm an artist, photographer, filmmaker.
Relax Be Cruel is a fiction film about Pier 34, which was located on the West Side of New York City. It was completely abandoned, holes on the ceiling, broken windows, the wind would go in, the snow, the rain. I really had a crush on that place.
I decided to make a film there. I had the idea of the story of a punk girl, who squatted in the pier for the summer. She would discover things that she was not supposed to see, and also meeting lost people, like her, just wandering. I wanted the film to be in black and white because this place was so much about light and darkness and shadows. The place was the real character of the film.
In the ‘80s, New York was really the city where you could experiment. There were sculptures, drawings on the walls. They all sweated something about sex, something about desire, sometimes in a very crude way, other times in a beautiful and poetic way. You could feel this kind of community, this collective energy of people using this place like a big studio.
I shot that film in 1983 and the pier was destroyed in 1984. It was maybe the last years of freedom before AIDS really devastated everything.