A Band Apart

-

Léo Soesanto

Is It Punk?

No. Not another punk tribute. In celebration of punk’s fortieth anniversary last year, the British obviously did it very well, raising the question that has everlastingly followed this subculture since its beginnings: Is it punk (i.e. having a state-funded celebration, having a celebration at all)? Joe Corré, son of punk co-conspirators Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, protested against this by setting fire to six million dollars’ worth of punk memorabilia from his own collection. Was that punk? “A pathetic corny stunt, a massive ego show-off”, punk singer and comedian Henry Rollins commented. While punk may be the official offspring of Dada and Situationism, it is also the unofficial child of Hamlet and Schrödinger’s Cat. It is and it is not. “If punk is dead then punk is not dead, there’s no difference between those two statements”, according to Sex Pistols archivist Johan Kugelberg.

But Never Mind the Nostalgia: Here’s A Band Apart. The aim of this programme is not to look backwards – it is Sex Pistols-free. Within the scope of the 2017 Parallax Views theme, it looks at the current production of films to find the same punk DNA. Youth. DIY. Anti-establishment. Direct action. Subversion of public space. Minimalism. Disorder. Satire. And of course, music. The youth are still angry, just wearing new clothes. There’s the same Schrödingerian tension of being outside/inside the system, being alone/together. Hence the Godardian title: A Band Apart.

Public Mayhem

Let’s review the programme’s playlist. Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama was the starting point of this programme, based on the naive concept that a group of terrorists/radicals has the same dynamics as a punk band. There’s a leader, there’s consent and dissent, whoring for the media, electricity. The Baader-Meinhof Gang felt like a band led by the charismatic Andreas Baader – and the Red Army Faction logo was their album cover. By contrast, Carlos ‘the Jackal’, the Venezuelan terrorist currently serving a life sentence in France, didn’t need a band. In 2016, the ‘punkiest’ image is perhaps – tragically – the chilling one depicting 22-year-old Mevlut Mert Altintas, the murderer of Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov in Turkey, standing next to his victim and raising his finger almost like a rock star in a stadium.

All this angst, from the 1970s to the present, runs through Nocturama. To be fair, Bonello’s film feels more post-punk than straight punk, less Sex Pistols and more Public Image Limited (the group formed by John Lydon – formerly Rotten – after the Pistols’ disbanding). The sense of menace is colder; droning rather than exploding. ‘Public Image’ indeed, when Nocturama’s characters wander through the sections of a department store staring at dummies, slowly realising they’re becoming dummies themselves.

At the opposite pole, Martine Doyen’s HAMSTERs would make a fine B-side to Nocturama, siding with the victims rather than the terrorists, even if they adopt the same tactics of shock value (here, by dancing randomly in public). Doyen’s film is straightforward punk and perfectly fits punk theorist Greil Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces: punk is an ageless force of mayhem, emerging at several moments of history and tracing back to Gnosticism. Or to quote one character in Nocturama: “It was bound to happen, right?”

New Archetypes

Let’s not forget that, by changing two letters, ‘punk’ becomes ‘prank’. Its humorous element is part of its energy, channelled here by Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson’s nirvanna the band the show, Pieter Van Hees and Joost Vandecasteele’s Generation B and Mars Roberge’s Scumbag. The two latter works strangely but slyly envision call centres and telemarketing companies as substitutes for rock bands in order to convey angst. A new avatar? The punk archetype (spiky coloured hair, leather jacket, outrageous everything) may have morphed into the nerdy slackers at the heart of nirvanna and Generation B: there’s the same sense of being an outcast, while the ongoing debate about geek culture being engulfed by the mainstream uses the same vocabulary as the one about being an ‘authentic’. The geek subversion of mainstream culture may be more subdued than punk’s, but it is again about promoting ‘the outsider’ and ‘low art’.

Another specifically British punk archetype was the subversion of the high school uniform (and any uniform): the Japanese joshikousei (high-school girl fetish) at the heart of Matsui Daigo’s Japanese Girls Never Die is their distant cousin, sharply returning in the film as a kick-ass warrior. And while dealing with Asian films, there is no need to justify the inclusion of Khavn’s Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember, as the IFFR audience knows very well that everything the Filipino filmmaker does or touches is punk.

A Band Apart, finally, is a subjective and partial map of sizzling youthful energy – and if you’re looking for black rebels in this predominantly ‘white riot’ section, well, we have the wonderful Black Rebels section. Films such as Morgan Simon’s A Taste of Ink and Karl Lemieux’ Maudite Poutine may be just personal, loud apocalypses which do not want to overthrow society – even if Simon’s film is a radical attack on patriarchy. But they are fed by the same sense of emergency and necessity that motivated punk decades ago. The essence of youth is longing for something (that is mostly unattainable), for fitting in somewhere, for playing a role at all costs. A band. A part.

alipato_the_very_brief_life_of_an_ember.jpg