Screening
Visual Dissonance (And Other Kinds of Noise): Two Punk and Hardcore Documents
Join us at the Film-Makers' Cooperative on Wednesday, September 11th, at 7pm, for two seminal documents of the punk and hardcore scenes of the '70s and '80s, Dan Graham's ROCK MY RELIGION and Ross McLaren's CRASH 'N' BURN, as part of our series SONIC VISIONS: EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMA AND MUSIC!
*$10 SUGGESTED DONATION
This program was originally announced as happening on SEPTEMBER 13th. It has now been rescheduled to SEPTEMBER 11th.
Visual Dissonance (And Other Kinds of Noise): Two Punk and Hardcore Documents
Curated by Tom Day, Executive Director and Chief Curator
Of all musical movements and subcultures Punk and Hardcore have made perhaps the most indelible impression on contemporary visual culture. From the iconic design of record covers by Jamie Reid and Raymond Pettibon and the performances of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Lydia Lunch, to paintings and sculptures by Mike Kelley, and Steven Parrino, Punk and Hardcore articulates an attitude, aesthetic and politics that has successfully migrated into all fields beyond music. This is no more apparent than in the world of the moving image, with the punk spirit infusing the burgeoning small gauge film scene in New York’s No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements and the UK punk scene leading to now iconic works by a transatlantic set of filmmakers including, for example, Abigail Child, Vivienne Dick, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Dereck Jarman, Eric Mitchel, Jamie Nares, Amos Poe, David Wojnarowicz and Nick Zedd.
Utilizing raw, unvarnished soundtracks, rough and ready aesthetics and a DIY sensibility, punk in film and video is given an unabashed airing in the recently departed Ross McLaren’s Crash and Burn. The 16mm film gives an account of Toronto's first punk club and features performances by the Dead Boys, Teenage Head and the Diodes. By now recognized as one of the early movement’s lewdest and most provocative groups, the Dead Boys are captured here with an entropic verve by McLaren’s corporally-hinged, ecstatic camerawork. The politics of punk here is anarchistic and playful, its ideology is not freighted with explicit activism or the neo-puritanism of the Hardcore movement but revels in explosive energy and undiluted bursts of sonic fury.
Documenting the immediacy and dynamism of punk performance from the position of the concert goer but also pulling back to explore the deeply rooted history of punk, of rock and of American community-making since colonization, Dan Graham’s pioneering essay film offers a cerebral and ludic examination from a passionate interlocutor located on punk rock’s front line in 1980s New York. Music forms a fundamental structuring conceit in Graham’s art, from the serialism of his early conceptual minimalist and magazine works on the repetitive inertia (both architectural and cultural) of American suburbia, to explicitly musical and performance works completed with Glenn Branca and Kim Gordon that sought to short-circuit the perceptions of audiences and their desirous identification with musical stars and groups.
Rock My Religion is a complex and densely layered historical allegory that envisions punk rock’s formation and appeal to bodily liberation as being a dead ringer for the activities of the Shaker religious sect and its privileging of a somatic relation to higher power. Graham said that he wanted the work, that he spent over three years editing in consultation with the video’s soundtrack’s composers Kim Gordon, Glenn Branca and Thurston Moore, to ‘restore historical memory in opposition to the notion of history as a simulation’, ‘there is possible’, he wrote, ‘the idea of an actual, although hidden, past, mostly eradicated from consciousness but briefly available in moments not obscured by the dominant ideology of newness’. In this vein, the film acts as a kind of séance or communing, going further than simply conflating punk, hardcore and new religious movements, Graham positions this new form of music culture as a precisely that, a culture emblematic of an entire way of thinking and approaching life that is worthy of historical analysis. The film intercuts spontaneous and raucous performances by Patti Smith and Black Flag with archival footage and photographs of the Shakers, as the eponymous essay penned by Graham scrolls up across the screen in didactic white text. This new punk culture was, for the artist, at its core, a political evolution for popular music, as he opined on the difference between rock music and punk:
Ambiguously built into rock is the audience’s awareness that is a commercialized form; its strategies of communication of sexual and politically subversive meaning in the mid-1970s were ironic and oblique. Punk Rock expressed the realities of the urban terror and repressed fascism of the post-Vietnam period in America. It reexamined the co-option and failure of early ‘70s rock—rock as utopian vehicle for the counterculture youth movement and Arcadian dreams of a liberated new society. It wished to dispense with the increasingly corporation-manufactured cult of the rock star “hero”
With his video, Graham stipulates that punk offers more than individual talismans or objects of appeal and desire prepackaged for conspicuous consumption, it offers instead the pluralism and heterogeneity of community, and liberation through an embrace of the noise of musical nonconformity.
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PROGRAM:
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Rock My Religion, Dan Graham, 1984, video, color, sound, 55 minutes
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Crash ‘n’ Burn, Ross McLaren, 1977, 16mm, B&W, sound, 27 minutes
Total Run Time: c.83 minutes