punk Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you can imagine what it would be like to try to document the life of one of your closest friends after their death, and to assemble everything into feature film length, you can probably see how difficult the process might be. This is what director Julien Temple had to do while he directed Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, about the lead singer for one of the world's best known bands, The Clash. Temple's documentary utilizes an enormous amount of archival footage, personal interviews, news interviews, vintage photos, audio recordings and footage that he himself had been filming since 1976. Temple also had access to Strummer's personal notebooks, writings and recordings, so they feature heavily in the doc. He uses Strummer's doodles and writings in animations that serve as transitions between scenes, or to underscore different pieces of the film. Of course, the main element that keeps everything sticking together is Joe Strummer and his music.

I know I sound like my dad, but when I was a kid, music and buzz about music couldn't move at the speed of light, via music blogs, MP3s and filesharing; it moved from town to town in photocopied 'zines, 45's, and gear-crammed Ford Econoline vans that smelled like dude. American Hardcore, adocumentary by Paul Rachman based on the book by Steven Blush, revisits that time, and celebrates it through a rag-tag mix of old, blurry footage, new, slightly blurry interviews and loud, fast music. Specifically, American Hardcore is subtitled "The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986," and offers an interesting counter-timeline for the early '80s. History, they say, is written by the winners; American Hardcore offers a few chapters from people who were, in fact, proud to be 'losers,' then and now, if that was defined by being set against the mainstream of consumerism and conformity.

American Hardcore isn't the most polished documentary you've ever seen -- there are plenty of interviews where the microphone cord sticks out on the subject's shirts like an undone zipper, or a spoken phrase is mixed with the huff and bluster of the wind. But then again, punk rock was never about sonic perfection: It was (and is) about emotional intensity, and American Hardcore has that in van loads, and delivers with onetwothreefour! power. All the usual suspects are interviewed here -- Henry Rollins of Black Flag, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, Greg Hetson of The Circle Jerks -- but there are also interviews with more marginal figures (or, more precisely, figures on the margins of the margins) like Vic Bondi of Articles of Faith, who sums up Hardcore's response to the Reagan era: "Everyone was saying it was 'Morning in America'; someone had to say 'It's fucking midnight!" In fact, the interviews are strong enough that Rachman wisely forgoes a narrator (And who would you get to narrate this film, anyhow? It's not really a gig for Morgan Freeman) and relies instead on the people who were there, the old VHS tapes plundered from some closet and a few wisely-chosen video graphics.

In the first scene of S. A Crary's Kill Your Idols, Martin Rev of Suicide describes mainstream rock in the early 1970s as an escape from reality. To him, bands like The Rolling Stones, with their glamorous image, dramatic outfits and bigger-than-life bravado were a necessary distraction from the increasingly depressing world outside. The Viet Nam War was a constant presence, and Watergate's stunning revelation was yet another blow to the fragile American psyche. Rev and others, however, wanted to deal with the world on its own terms, and to find a way to address the horror and perceived injustice of the lives they lived. Rev expressed his fury through music and he, along with his band Suicide, was one of the first entries into what shortly became known as the No Wave scene, a short-lived punk movement rooted in New York's East Village.

Starting with the founding of Suicide in 1972, Crary's film documents the next two decades in New York punk, with a twin focus on No Wave and the small group of NY punk bands that either made it big or threatened to do so in 2002 (the best known of which are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes). Despite its narrow focus, Kill Your Idols -- which Crary directed, photographed, and edited -- should appeal to an audience well beyond the punk music niche: In addition to an historical document about the founding of an often over-looked movement, it's also a meditation on artistic creation, and the sources of inspiration.

Thanks to Palm Pictures, American (and, oddly, Caribbean) fans of post-punk music will finally get a chance to see Kill Your Idols, S. A. Crary's award-winning 2004 documentary about the (sub?) genre's development in New York. The film, which appears to have already had a theatrical run in the UK, details the New York punk scene between 1972 and 2002, exploring both the history of the movement and comparing its recent practitioners (unfavorably) to their predecessors. According to this incredibly informative review, the film is most valuable for Crary's early emphasis is on the much-neglected No Wave, a short-lived movement that grew up in response to "the perceived conservatism of [bands like] The Ramones, The Heartbreakers, Patti Smith and Television," who, though "punk was supposed to tear up the rulebook ... were still dependent on the traditional rock music blueprint." The movie tells its story through interviews with a myriad of punk artists, as well as "ultra-rare, grainy black and white ... footage" of the bands in action.

Palm will have the film in theaters this summer, and will, in collaboration with Netflix, also handle its subsequent DVD release.