Anne D'Agnillo and David Brisbin love the '80s—kinda—in Philip Hartman's valentine-noir No Picnic (Photo: Pioneer Theater)

The Reeler stole a few minutes Wednesday from filmmaker Philip Hartman, who was knee-deep in running the HOWL! Festival of East Village Arts—which he founded in 2003—and preparing for the 20th anniversary run of his gritty New York classic, No Picnic.

I had been particularly interested in getting a few details about the film, a poetic portrait of the city circa 1985 through the prism of the East Village. Although "prism" might not seem like the most appropriate word to characterize a movie that unspools in grainy 16mm black and white, it remains Hartman's loving tribute to a realm of possibility and character that time either forgot or adulterated—depending on your point of view.

"It's amazing because the neighborhood was so much in transition back then—and still is," Hartman told me. "But it was really kind of the onslaught, and the community was really engaged in fighting it. There were rent strike banners hanging off fire escapes. There was tons of visual art on the streets. Some of it was kind of spooky. But it was a real sense of defiance in the air back then, which really got sort of replaced by acquiescence. We tried to capture that. We were scrambling around to capture locations before they disappeared literally before our eyes. And that was 20 years ago, so you can imagine how many of them are utterly gone now."

Among the other disappeared standards punctuating the East Village, Hartman features Macabee "Mac" Cohen (a haunted David Brisbin), a jukebox supplier and former rocker who battles professional ambivalence while his personal life wilts in the midsummer heat. He leads a two-year rent strike in his apartment building; indulges the Canadian neighbor (Anne D'Agnillo) who wants to marry him for a green card; and pursues a beautiful, nameless woman (Myoshin) in a photograph he pilfers from an accident scene.

An alternating resentment and resignation plagues Mac in the long shadow of his changing city, compounded by lingering sexual frustrations and ceaseless poverty. Mac's mother's attempts to invoke his "ambition, discipline and talent" lead nowhere, but Mac represents more than a mid-80s slacker prototype; he is, at heart, a New Yorker wedged between eras.

"I don't know—I've always thought of it as a sad comedy" Hartman said. "Maybe it'll even seem a little more sad when I see it this time."

So despite the heat, the vexation and everything else, it is a nostalgic film?

"Yeah, because it's an elegy for a bygone era," He said. "I don't think that anybody has nostalgia for it as like an idealized 'good old days.' I mean, if anything, we refer to it as the 'bad old days.' But there still was kind of a great, bleak energy that I think a lot of us still yearn for."

As such, No Picnic is often referred to as a black-and-white love letter to pre-gentrification New York. However, two decades of redevelopment and general cultural cynicism supplants that love with a far more guarded affection. Looking in on Mac's quest, Hartman emphasizes an unattainability that applies as much to the city's soul as it does to Mac's elusive dream girl; no amount of longing can reverse her capricious, corrupted, tormented course. This reality provokes a relapsed helplessness that peeks out in everything from motorists trapped behind double-parked cars to Mac's own half-hearted suicide attempts. Like the city around him, Mac has no intention of dying—but Hartman implies this has as much to do with resilience as it does with Mac's flagging stamina to resist evolution.

David Brisbin as the haunted jukebox hack Mac Cohen (Photo: Pioneer Theater)

And the film's high-contrast aesthetic only emphasizes the collision of past and present, or loves here and gone. Think of it as less of a "black-and-white love letter" than it is a "valentine-noir." When a restaurant manager tips Mac off to the mystery woman's address, he scrawls the address 268 Rivington on his arm with permanent marker. However, when he arrives at the address, he is confronted by a deep black abyss where a tenement (and, in turn, Mac's potential for romantic love) had long been torn down. The void aches in Mac like a phantom limb (he did write the street address on his arm, after all), and neither the shot nor the symbol would have ever worked in color.

"We were trying to do something that was a little more meditative," Hartman told me, adding that the black-and-white photography helped establish that quality. "(Cinematographer) Peter Hutton had never shot a feature film before, but he was a celebrated avant-garde/personal diary filmmaker. I had seen some of his short films, which I really loved, and felt like that was the look I was looking for in my film. We collaborated a lot. He had never shot actors before, either; his films are like a series of stills captured by a movie camera."

No Picnic's images were powerful enough to earn Hutton the best cinematography prize at 1987's Sundance Film Festival, and two decades later, they continue to linger after viewing. It is a testament to HOWL!'s success—and Hartman's prescience—that the filmmaker can reintroduce the film to a new audience a generation after it was conceived. It is no coincidence that Mac is holding a baby in the film's final frame.

"We try to look forward as much as we look back," Hartman said. "It's not pure nostalgia, but we are trying to celebrate the legacy here. This has been the cradle of the counterculture for half a century, so there's a lot of great stuff we need to remember and celebrate."