Post by Fuggle on May 11, 2007 6:00:11 GMT -5
It's alive
May 11, 2007
The rebel heart of punk beats on at ACMI this month, writes Michael Dwyer.
The Sex Pistols' last show Winterland,
San Francisco
Johnny Rotten's famous last words are chillingly bitter. There he is in the denouement of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, crouched at the lip of an American stage like a particularly scornful gargoyle, surveying the Sex Pistols' last, sheep-like audience.
"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" he inquires. His beady eyes smoulder with the fury of betrayal and defeat; resigned comprehension that his punk rebellion has been bought and sold by the group - or status quo - it sought to destroy.
In a sense, that's the endlessly repeating story of punk: kid gobs on Man, Man scrapes gob off suit, Man waters gob down and sells it to a million other kids. Goodbye Johnny Rotten, hello Billy Idol. Goodbye Teen Spirit, hello grunge chic. And so on.
But English pop culture analyst and author Jack Sargeant has a less defeatist view of the punk ethos and phenomenon. He's the curator of Focus On Punk, a celluloid celebration opening at ACMI in Federation Square tonight.
"In a way, the most interesting thing about punk is not punk, it's what happened 10 seconds afterwards," he says. "As much as John (Rotten) might have felt cheated, you also have this radical independent artistic spirit that has carried on."
He points to the astounding oeuvre of Billy Childish, whose Chatham Super 8 Cinema collection will screen at ACMI for the first time in Australia next Friday. England's most prolific advocate of amateurism is no household name, but perhaps that's why he's been able to forge such a rich trail through punk, rock, literature, painting and film since the year Sid Vicious died.
Then there's America's maestro of transgressive cinema, John Waters, whose gratuitous bad taste '70s exploitation films are represented by the seldom-screened Desperate Living. Shown back-to-back, the different styles and mores of Childish and Waters begin to describe the parameters of the ACMI program.
"There's this kind of twin narrative all the way through punk, of punk as a cultural phenomenon of revolution, and punk as clever marketing," says Sargeant. "What we've done is try to choose films that on one hand represent the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk, and on the other hand films that show that it was also considered a (commercial) youth phenomenon."
Tomorrow night's Australian premiere is Ghost On The Highway, Kurt Voss' sobering documentary about the Gun Club's deeply disturbed and doomed instigator, Jeffrey Lee Pierce. It's a portrait of a dead, insane egomaniac whom Henry Rollins calls "a shambling screw-up" with a "wounded caterwaul" of a voice. And unlike most witnesses, he liked the guy.
After a smattering of shorts ranging from Throbbing Gristle to Blondie, we're then invited to giggle smugly at Lou Adler's '81 Hollywood "youthsploitation" feature, Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, in which members of the Pistols and the Clash lease their credibility to a B-fable about an all-girl punk band trying to crack the big time.
"We're trying to show the tension in that idea that as soon as you have punk, you have the notion of punk selling out," Sargeant explains. "The Sex Pistols are the most obvious example of that debate: were they a garage band or were they a boy band?"
That question lies at the duplicitous heart of The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, the film that closes the 10-day ACMI season like the jewel in punk's crown - or the last laugh in the face of whatever punk had become by 1980. A riotous confusion of fact and fantasy, director Julien Temple says the film was all about "dynamiting a myth" that had become too comfortable too soon.
"I think it was a very punk film in its intentions," Temple says, "because it was designed to enrage its audience and confuse them; deliberately making things that were true seem completely unbelievable and making things that were untrue digestible as fact.
"The reason for that was there was this feeling that punk had begun to be assimilated and the Pistols were being worshipped on bedroom walls in the way that previous generations of rock stars had sought as their divine right.
"(I had) a strong feeling that that was not what the Sex Pistols were about. I think they were inciting people to do it for themselves, to smash those myths of star aura that had been paid for by record companies. So it was a film intended to annoy its audience and hopefully provoke them into thinking a little bit."
Rather poetically, the film was made in a state of evolving collapse that perpetuated the story it purported to tell. John Lydon (formerly Rotten) had ceased talking to Machiavellian manager Malcolm McLaren, and a similarly rancorous Sid Vicious reluctantly appeared in exchange for the lifestyle privileges that would kill him before the film's release.
McLaren's volatile role changed from collaborator to dictator before he withdrew his name entirely, leaving Temple to stitch together its tortuous narrative alone. According to the director, the priceless irony is that the supposed mastermind of the Pistols' rise and fall wound up as deluded as any punk of the era, a classic victim of punk's perversion by ego and money.
"Malcolm himself actually came to believe much of that film was true after a while," Temple says. "The idea that the Pistols were puppets operated by Malcolm, who had no sentient aspect to their beings, was a deliberately provocative ploy to anger and confuse people. It was never true.
"So I did get annoyed with Malcolm saying, 'They're my little pieces of clay, I moulded them exactly how I wanted them', because I saw that when he was in a room with them he was terrified of them, terrified that he was going to get the shit beaten out of him. And on several occasions, that did happen."
Temple would cop a hiding himself before the greed decade was over, when his highly touted crossover into the commercial mainstream, Absolute Beginners, became one of the most damaging flops in British cinematic history. He returned to his first love with the more sympathetic (and truthful) Pistols documentary, The Filth & The Fury, in 2000.
"I think you can find the punk attitude as far back as Chaucer," he says of his perennial inspiration. "If you look at The Miller's Tale, there's a bunch of musicians who are very humorously portrayed in a manner that is very similar to the tabloid portrayal of the Pistols: it's all about vomiting and farting and making noise.
"So that viral strain has been around in society for a very long time, and I think it is still inspirational. I think the worse the world becomes, the more important those ideas become."
To that end, his next feature focuses on another punk icon. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is due for Australian cinematic release later this year. The title, he says, is a symbol of the optimism the former Clash singer held for the DIY punk ethos, right up until his death in December 2002.
"I think it is still a punk film in terms of using Joe's life as an inspiration to think for yourself," Temple says. "It's hopefully provocative. It rips things up, sticks things together that aren't meant to be together. It has a rebel heart, that's for sure."
For all its mixed messages and garish distractions, that's the part that's still pumping beneath the surface of the Focus On Punk film season.
"Punk was the '70s version of revolutionary art," says Jack Sargeant. "You can trace it back to the beatniks and dada, you can trace it forward to grunge and dance music. You can hear it in John Coltrane playing saxophone or Roland Howard playing guitar or John Lydon saying, 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?', this urge to be an individual in the face of corporate mainstream culture."
And never mind the body count. If you thought Sid Vicious was a sad and clueless victim of punk's capacity to eat itself alive, Ghost On The Highway asks us to consider the infinitely more tragic story of a man who idolised him, and never even enjoyed the cold comfort of getting famous.
"What's interesting about the Jeffrey Lee Pierce film," counters Sargeant, "is that although it's a downward spiral, every person who's interviewed in that film is a famous punk who's gone on to do great stuff, from Kid Congo Powers to Henry Rollins, who have all been fired by that inaugural spark. For every Jim Morrison or Jeffrey Lee Pierce, there's a Neil Young or a Kid Congo Powers. There's always someone who survives."
For Julien Temple, the message that survives with them is simple: "Question everything. Even a film purporting to be about the Sex Pistols, made by their manager: you should question that as much - maybe more - than anything. I think you have to stand with your back to the wall in terms of trying to find the truth. Trust yourself."
Focus On Punk opens tonight at ACMI, Federation Square. Derek Jarman's Jubilee at 7.15pm is followed by Penelope Spheeris' Suburbia at 9.15pm.
May 11, 2007
The rebel heart of punk beats on at ACMI this month, writes Michael Dwyer.
The Sex Pistols' last show Winterland,
San Francisco
Johnny Rotten's famous last words are chillingly bitter. There he is in the denouement of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, crouched at the lip of an American stage like a particularly scornful gargoyle, surveying the Sex Pistols' last, sheep-like audience.
"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" he inquires. His beady eyes smoulder with the fury of betrayal and defeat; resigned comprehension that his punk rebellion has been bought and sold by the group - or status quo - it sought to destroy.
In a sense, that's the endlessly repeating story of punk: kid gobs on Man, Man scrapes gob off suit, Man waters gob down and sells it to a million other kids. Goodbye Johnny Rotten, hello Billy Idol. Goodbye Teen Spirit, hello grunge chic. And so on.
But English pop culture analyst and author Jack Sargeant has a less defeatist view of the punk ethos and phenomenon. He's the curator of Focus On Punk, a celluloid celebration opening at ACMI in Federation Square tonight.
"In a way, the most interesting thing about punk is not punk, it's what happened 10 seconds afterwards," he says. "As much as John (Rotten) might have felt cheated, you also have this radical independent artistic spirit that has carried on."
He points to the astounding oeuvre of Billy Childish, whose Chatham Super 8 Cinema collection will screen at ACMI for the first time in Australia next Friday. England's most prolific advocate of amateurism is no household name, but perhaps that's why he's been able to forge such a rich trail through punk, rock, literature, painting and film since the year Sid Vicious died.
Then there's America's maestro of transgressive cinema, John Waters, whose gratuitous bad taste '70s exploitation films are represented by the seldom-screened Desperate Living. Shown back-to-back, the different styles and mores of Childish and Waters begin to describe the parameters of the ACMI program.
"There's this kind of twin narrative all the way through punk, of punk as a cultural phenomenon of revolution, and punk as clever marketing," says Sargeant. "What we've done is try to choose films that on one hand represent the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk, and on the other hand films that show that it was also considered a (commercial) youth phenomenon."
Tomorrow night's Australian premiere is Ghost On The Highway, Kurt Voss' sobering documentary about the Gun Club's deeply disturbed and doomed instigator, Jeffrey Lee Pierce. It's a portrait of a dead, insane egomaniac whom Henry Rollins calls "a shambling screw-up" with a "wounded caterwaul" of a voice. And unlike most witnesses, he liked the guy.
After a smattering of shorts ranging from Throbbing Gristle to Blondie, we're then invited to giggle smugly at Lou Adler's '81 Hollywood "youthsploitation" feature, Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, in which members of the Pistols and the Clash lease their credibility to a B-fable about an all-girl punk band trying to crack the big time.
"We're trying to show the tension in that idea that as soon as you have punk, you have the notion of punk selling out," Sargeant explains. "The Sex Pistols are the most obvious example of that debate: were they a garage band or were they a boy band?"
That question lies at the duplicitous heart of The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, the film that closes the 10-day ACMI season like the jewel in punk's crown - or the last laugh in the face of whatever punk had become by 1980. A riotous confusion of fact and fantasy, director Julien Temple says the film was all about "dynamiting a myth" that had become too comfortable too soon.
"I think it was a very punk film in its intentions," Temple says, "because it was designed to enrage its audience and confuse them; deliberately making things that were true seem completely unbelievable and making things that were untrue digestible as fact.
"The reason for that was there was this feeling that punk had begun to be assimilated and the Pistols were being worshipped on bedroom walls in the way that previous generations of rock stars had sought as their divine right.
"(I had) a strong feeling that that was not what the Sex Pistols were about. I think they were inciting people to do it for themselves, to smash those myths of star aura that had been paid for by record companies. So it was a film intended to annoy its audience and hopefully provoke them into thinking a little bit."
Rather poetically, the film was made in a state of evolving collapse that perpetuated the story it purported to tell. John Lydon (formerly Rotten) had ceased talking to Machiavellian manager Malcolm McLaren, and a similarly rancorous Sid Vicious reluctantly appeared in exchange for the lifestyle privileges that would kill him before the film's release.
McLaren's volatile role changed from collaborator to dictator before he withdrew his name entirely, leaving Temple to stitch together its tortuous narrative alone. According to the director, the priceless irony is that the supposed mastermind of the Pistols' rise and fall wound up as deluded as any punk of the era, a classic victim of punk's perversion by ego and money.
"Malcolm himself actually came to believe much of that film was true after a while," Temple says. "The idea that the Pistols were puppets operated by Malcolm, who had no sentient aspect to their beings, was a deliberately provocative ploy to anger and confuse people. It was never true.
"So I did get annoyed with Malcolm saying, 'They're my little pieces of clay, I moulded them exactly how I wanted them', because I saw that when he was in a room with them he was terrified of them, terrified that he was going to get the shit beaten out of him. And on several occasions, that did happen."
Temple would cop a hiding himself before the greed decade was over, when his highly touted crossover into the commercial mainstream, Absolute Beginners, became one of the most damaging flops in British cinematic history. He returned to his first love with the more sympathetic (and truthful) Pistols documentary, The Filth & The Fury, in 2000.
"I think you can find the punk attitude as far back as Chaucer," he says of his perennial inspiration. "If you look at The Miller's Tale, there's a bunch of musicians who are very humorously portrayed in a manner that is very similar to the tabloid portrayal of the Pistols: it's all about vomiting and farting and making noise.
"So that viral strain has been around in society for a very long time, and I think it is still inspirational. I think the worse the world becomes, the more important those ideas become."
To that end, his next feature focuses on another punk icon. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is due for Australian cinematic release later this year. The title, he says, is a symbol of the optimism the former Clash singer held for the DIY punk ethos, right up until his death in December 2002.
"I think it is still a punk film in terms of using Joe's life as an inspiration to think for yourself," Temple says. "It's hopefully provocative. It rips things up, sticks things together that aren't meant to be together. It has a rebel heart, that's for sure."
For all its mixed messages and garish distractions, that's the part that's still pumping beneath the surface of the Focus On Punk film season.
"Punk was the '70s version of revolutionary art," says Jack Sargeant. "You can trace it back to the beatniks and dada, you can trace it forward to grunge and dance music. You can hear it in John Coltrane playing saxophone or Roland Howard playing guitar or John Lydon saying, 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?', this urge to be an individual in the face of corporate mainstream culture."
And never mind the body count. If you thought Sid Vicious was a sad and clueless victim of punk's capacity to eat itself alive, Ghost On The Highway asks us to consider the infinitely more tragic story of a man who idolised him, and never even enjoyed the cold comfort of getting famous.
"What's interesting about the Jeffrey Lee Pierce film," counters Sargeant, "is that although it's a downward spiral, every person who's interviewed in that film is a famous punk who's gone on to do great stuff, from Kid Congo Powers to Henry Rollins, who have all been fired by that inaugural spark. For every Jim Morrison or Jeffrey Lee Pierce, there's a Neil Young or a Kid Congo Powers. There's always someone who survives."
For Julien Temple, the message that survives with them is simple: "Question everything. Even a film purporting to be about the Sex Pistols, made by their manager: you should question that as much - maybe more - than anything. I think you have to stand with your back to the wall in terms of trying to find the truth. Trust yourself."
Focus On Punk opens tonight at ACMI, Federation Square. Derek Jarman's Jubilee at 7.15pm is followed by Penelope Spheeris' Suburbia at 9.15pm.