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WRITER, FORMER MODEL, DEDICATED HEROIN ADDICT, AND MESMERIZING STAR OF ABEL FERRARA'S MS. 45. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ZOE LUND, AS RECOUNTED BY KRISTIN M. JONES
An elegant apparition in skinny jeans, high heels, and a big black hat, stepping from the shadows of Anthology Film Archives-that was my first impression of the actress and screenwriter Zoe Lund. She was hard but sweet, with a wide smile. Best known for her starring role in Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 (80) and her script for Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (92), Lund was many things to those who knew her: a crackerjack storyteller, an idealist, a con artist, a disciplined and inspired worker when her considerable talent wasn't undermined by the drug she ardently embraced: heroin. She was a gorgeous anachronism-a walking emblem of Sixties radical chic-but also a moralist. Considered by many to be a great beauty, she worked as a professional model during her twenties. Her work still attracts obsessive fans (see the extensive dossier published on the website Senses of Cinema in Sep/Oct 2002), and in J. J. Martin's forthcoming documentary The Self-Destruction of Gia, she makes a posthumous appearance, describing life with heroin in rapturous and brutal detail.
We met in 1995 because I'd volunteered to help her catalogue some footage by the late filmmaker Edouard de Laurot, her former boyfriend and one of the original editors of the journal Film Culture. The footage was in terrible shape, but Lund and Lithuanian-born director Julius Ziz crafted a rough cut of a new film from de Laurot's outtakes, a tribute to his work entitled Chronicle, which she presented in Paris in 1997. That project and others, however-including How I Was Conceived, an expressionistic feature Ziz was directing from a script they co-wrote, in which she was to star with Lou Castel-remain unfinished. When she died in 1999, at age 37, she had many plans, among which the biggest, perhaps, was to end her long romance with junk. "She just touched the surface as an actress, as a writer, as everything," Ferrara says. "And she really loved life. That kid shoulda lived to 100."
I vividly remember her crouching and then unfurling her limbs to suggest a "scorpion woman," one of the images in de...