You Are Not Alone

.You Are Not I still photograph by Nan Goldin

Saturday's New York Times had an great short article about the long-lost Sara Driver film You Are Not I. Driver had thought that her own badly beat-up copy was the only one in existence, but a clean copy was recently found in the Morocco apartment of Paul Bowles, who wrote the short story on which the film is based.

The movie – shot in six days near her parents' house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following.... The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma. For Ms. Driver, the film’s rediscovery has been like opening a time capsule of the No Wave independent-film scene, which flourished in New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It included directors like Jim Jarmusch (Ms. Driver’s longtime romantic partner and the cinematographer and co-writer for You Are Not I), Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Bette Gordon, Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) and even Kathryn Bigelow, of The Hurt Locker fame, who made her first short in New York in 1978 (featuring the odd pairing of Gary Busey and the French semiotician Sylvère Lotringer). It was a tiny film world where favors and friendships often stood in for the money no one had.

You Are Not I has been screening at festivals and hopefully will be on DVD soon. Here's the only short clip I could find on the web: