James Chance

How to play a melody? A magic moment, unrepeatable. Life is just a bowl of cherries. Film as art as life as film.

Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites including Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace. The latter location required ingenuity: Posing as potential renters, Nares and associates asked the manager to show them the apartment, then unlocked the windows on the way out; a few hours later, they broke back into the space, full cast and crew in tow, to shoot the necessary scenes.

Documents performances of DNA, James Chance and the Contortions, and Boris Policeband in NYC at a benefit concert for X Motion Picture Magazine and artists’ group Collaborative Projects Inc. It was shot in black and white super 8 and edited on video. It was filmed in 1978 but not completed until 2009.

"Sax Maniac: The Life and Times of James Chance" delves into the groundbreaking career of James Siegfried, better known as James Chance or James White, a seminal figure in the late 1970s and early 1980s New York City "No Wave" music scene. Produced and directed by his brother, David Siegfried, the documentary chronicles James's journey from his early days in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he first explored jazz and protopunk.