Eric Mitchell (filmmaker)

Eric Mitchell is a French born American writer, director, and actor who moved to downtown New York City in the early 1970s. He has acted in many No Wave films such as Permanent Vacation (1980) by Jim Jarmusch, but is best known for his own films that are usually written and directed by him: Kidnapped, Red Italy, Underground U.S.A. and The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues, starring Steve Buscemi, Vincent Gallo, Mark Boone Junior, and Rockets Redglare. Mitchell worked out of New York City's sordid East Village area in conjunction with Colab's X Motion Picture Magazine and other performance artists and noise musicians. There he created a series of scruffy, deeply personal, short Super 8mm and 16mm films in which he combined darkly sinister images to explore the manner in which the individual is constrained by society.

Early life

Mitchell came of age in the French art world, as his father, artist Luc Simon, was companion of painter Françoise Gilot between her marriage to Picasso and her subsequent marriage to Jonas Salk. Mitchell himself began to work, as a teenager, as an assistant photographer on the French magazine Lui, shooting with leading glamour models of the day.

Performance and music

In the mid-1970s, Mitchell mounted several multi-media events at The Kitchen in New York that were documented by Jimmy De Sana. With fellow artist Martin Kippenberger, Mitchell released the punk rock single Luxus in 1979.

Acting

Mitchell has acted in Permanent Vacation (1980) by Jim Jarmusch and in Amos Poe's no wave classics Unmade Beds (1976) and The Foreigner (1978), where he plays a young Frenchman in New York that is hotly pursued up and down the busy streets of New York City by thugs. Along the way he encounters a couple of bizarre young women (a new wave songstress delivering a rendition of Bertolt Brecht's Bilbao Song and a sadist).