Casandra Stark

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Casandra Stark Mele is a New York City underground Icon, considered one of the "principal players in the Cinema of Transgression" (Sabin 1999). She made all her films in the 1980’s and early 1990s under the name Casandra Stark. Since then she has added her real family name Mele to her professional name due to a deep connection she felt for her family roots. "Mele" is Italian for apple.

Casandra grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut with the first name Rosanne and still answers to “Ro”. She is a dramatic vocalist and live performer as well as a painter and film maker.

Her films often featured the music of one of her bands such as Menace Dement and/or the Trees a duo with guitarist and political scientist Frank Morales with whom Casandra has a child named Frankie.

Her film The Anarchists was aired on Manhattan cable Television in 1992 and features the music of Missing Foundation. It was partly filmed in Naples, Italy (A city she refers to as Napoli) as well as New York. Her film Parades of Crazy ranges from very surrealistic images of people marching slowly through a park wearing masks to a beach scene in black and white of Casandra her self and her friend Laura May wearing white gowns and splashing in the waves and floating in the tide. Most of her films do not feature Casandra herself, however she starred in the title role of her Death of an Arabian Woman.

She authored six chapbooks one of which, Your World Not Mine, chronicles events in her life growing up an epileptic.

She has dedicated her talents to working with mentally challenged of the Lower East Side promoting creative outlets such as Coocooloco: An Anthology Of Creative Writings From The "So-Called Mentally Ill"; The Lower East Side And Beyond, a collection of poetry from community access, a creative work shop.

She recently became a high school teacher in New York. Hardly any of her students know that Miss Mele is a prolific artist who has starred in films by Richard Kern such as Submit to me Now and has been admired by the likes of Sonic Youth and her friend Wooden Thomas.

She is also an exceptional photographer who has captured the urban magic and beauty of the Lower East Side of New York City and Napoli (Naples), almost always in Black and White. She claims that she once had a goldfish that lived for about 20 years.

[edit] References

Sabin, Roger 1999. Punk Rock: So What?; The Cultural Legacy of Punk ISBN 0-415-17030-3

Casandra Stark at the Internet Movie Database

[edit] Further reading

Patterson, Clayton (2005). Captured: A Film & Video History of the Lower East Side ISBN 1-58322-674-5
Jack Sargeant (1999). Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression ISBN 1-84068-054-7
Casandra Stark Mele - official web site