Face Addict

A really good documentary on a really crazy group of people living like there is no tomorrow in the most cruelly beautiful city!This film is about what was going on in the heart of our modern world, New York, in the late 70s and the early 80s.Those who have survived the experience of those years (director Edo Bertoglio included) tell their story and make up the puzzle of what NY was at that time.All those hip, sexy, cool and always-stoned guys of something about 25 years ago are now middle aged people without drugs in their body anymore but with a memory filled with most of what made up NY myth.Factory ,Andy Warhol and all those underground artists and performers are all there.Definitely a very good documentary but one of the most cooooool films I have ever seen

An insider's look into the creative world of NY downtown scene of the late 70s-early 80s filmed by one of the members of the party, a photographer Edo Bertoglio. No wave, new wave, Warhol's Factory, Basquiat, post-beat generation, poets, queers, freaks. Just a tip of the iceberg of various artistic phenomenas that were born in that time, when art blurred with life. Some of those remarkable characters died shortly before or after their work has reached wider public. We look at that period through the eyes of the people involved. Those who survived were visisted by their old pal. He opens his archive of photographs, shares it with his friends. And they're sharing common memories of that incredibly creative and crazy period. One of the common experiences were drugs and during the second half of the movie Bertolio is telling the story of his and his friends addiction and its role in total desintegration of the scene. From now on we're witnessing Walter Steding helplessly trying to fight his heroine addiction. But fortunately "Face Addict" is not just a documentary portrait of past era neither it's anti drug manifesto. It's also a great, intimate look into those fragile people's souls.

Edo Bertoglio wonders aloud near the beginning of his film Face Addict, will his old friends answer his questions? The answer is yes, and they are very candid and transparent about the passions which drove them to lead the lives they led in the early 1980s in New York City.

One must feel that this film was sadder to make for Bertoglio, Maripol, and the others, than for us to watch it. For while we see them react as they remember the loss of those who were casualties of the drug use of those days, we see mostly those who are (in Edo's word) survivors.

And it is just those survivors who give Face Addict its Redemptive quality. While being honest about the lost opportunity, the lost friends, stemming from the drug use, Face Addict's survivors are nevertheless able to show humor, wit, and continued creativity. One wonders what magnitude of work this community of artists might have produced had they not saddled themselves with heroin, et cetera.

Much time is spent with violinist, painter, and one-time Warhol collaborator Walter Steding. Steding is, as Bertoglio notes, "the only one of us who still succeeds to live the way we lived back then." As one who loves to paint, I could not helped being very moved by Steding's soliloquy, delivered in muted lighting, on fulfilling his obligation as an artist no matter what it might cost him. This, for me, was the climax of the film. The viewer does not yet know whether Steding will truly end up in a Bowery flophouse (as he surmises could be the case if he follows his muse), but one is tempted to stand up and cheer after his carefully given but seemingly impromptu speech on what it means to follow a vocation as an artist. It seems clear that Walter has been over this theoretical ground with himself many times in his own mind. Near the end of the film, however, the viewer becomes a guest at an art opening of Steding's work, which is quite impressive.

Face Addict will also appeal to the viewer with an interest in the visual aspects of Manhattan. The music utilized during these passages, interspersed with Bertoglio's commentary on how his heroin addiction crept up and gripped him, is masterfully chosen.