Ciao! Manhattan: The Rise and Fall of the Underground

In 1972, after five years of intermittent filming, John Palmer and David Weisman completed their film Ciao! Manhattan, starring Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s muse and for a brief period in the mid-1960s, an icon of New-York counterculture. The film tells the story of a former underground cinema superstar who looks back on a past that strongly resembles Edie Sedgwick’s own story. Considered a unique example of avant-garde cinema, Ciao! Manhattan uses a weird, boundary-breaking narrative. Is it a biopic of a real-life celebrity or a docudrama? Each reference conjures up a different chapter of underground mythology, along with widespread drug use, self-destruction, abuse, and sexual addiction. Ciao! Manhattan is a “a requiem for the Sixties.” Successfully depicting the transition of a generation and its culture from euphoria, non-stop partying and pushing the limits to decline and exhaustion, the film still holds a special place in the landscape of underground cinema.