pirate radio - Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio
Richard Curtis
Universal Pictures
2009

I doubt that there will ever be a better pirate radio film than Pump Up the Volume although the series People Just Do Nothing is a strong offering. Pirate Radio, also called The Boat that Rocked, is leagues below its predecessor (that's a pun for a boat movie). This kind of movie... well, a lot of effort must go into every movie, but who could care about a movie like this? It's the usual colorful cast of randy characters (if they were american I'd call them zany) who have somewhat amusing things happen in their lives. This is a movie, this is the basic movie concept, now fill the picture out with a time (the sixties) and place (England) - and for an extra dose of novelty, it's set on one of the boats that broadcast rock music at England from its coastal waters.

The film has a lot of people who are in funny shows, Roy from The IT Crowd, Rhys Darby, whose really funny, is here, and so is the rotund guy from all the Simon Pegg films. Philip Hoffman is here too, presumably because he played Lester Bangs in another rock movie. I find sixties nostalgia to be obnoxious most of the time, with everyone dressed goofy and their floppy hair and groovy talking and the pretense that all those rock songs that people my age have mostly heard in TV commercials and movies all our lives were so magical and dangerous to the establishment. Now, in 2016, the sound of the electric guitar is a basic signifier of youthful rebellion in TV commercials.

So the film shows scenes from the boat, interspersed by the gray offices of anti-rock members of parliament who want the boats shut down. Through most of the movie, the "pirates" aren't breaking the law, and it seems likely to me that the term 'pirate' was applied retrospectively. So that's it, they're shut down, they keep going for a bit but that is pretty much the end of the floating broadcasters. What's interesting is that while this is supposedly the end of the era, rock radio became pretty dominant afterwards (in real life) while London is just one location that continues to have a pirate radio scene with complicated signaling systems. Really what these boats broadcast was a commercially viable alternative to the BBC.

The film shows the impact of the station by showing different people's reactions at different places. A girl in her bedroom listening, a group of people at some work place, some old guy dancing. This is where the difference is most significant from Pump up the Volume, where the radio of happy hard harry is also shown to pierce the community, but its also woven into it.

hippies - 1973 - Godspell

Godspell 
David Greene
Columbia Pictures
1973
103 min.

Godspell is the film that I expected Hair to be. I assumed, before watching, that Hair would be tedious and obnoxious and instead it was actually fun to watch and its music was pretty good. Godspell, a retelling of the Gospel of Matthew, features a group of clowns who are double metaphors: firstly for Hippies and secondly for Christ and his disciples. These clowns wander around an unpopulated lower Manhattan following a charismatic clown christ-figure who imparts his wisdom and sings songs. The clowns clown constantly and almost every line of the film is delivered in a different goofy voice. I'm sure there's some degree of theatrical virtuosity in pulling that off but I found the constant clown routines and cartoony voice switching to be just so unbelievably irritating that I found it difficult to appreciate anything I was watching.

When the clowns were singing heartfelt songs the obnoxiousness was suspended, and a couple other key scenes were okay to watch, such as this film's version of the crucifixion where the Christ figure was lashed to a fence with red scarves. Like Hair, this film depicts Central Park in New York City, what must be the most represented park in the world, as a site of contemporary spiritual awakening.

Following the lamentation scene, the city's population appears, indicating that, just like on the theater stage, the space depicted is removed from real space.

beats - 2007 - Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady
Noah Buschel
2007
Jean Doumanian Productions
80 min

Neal Cassady is a biographical film focusing on Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty muse for On the Road, Neal Cassady. This film minimizes his friendship with Kerouac, confining their interactions to the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the movie actually focuses on the second phase of Cassady's career as a behind-the-scenes countercultural protagonist, his relationship to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Cassady is a pivotal figure in American counterculture, first inspiring the beats to write and later befriending one of the best known hippie collectives of the era. His relevance is rooted in his friendships with the era-defining writers of these periods, and some of the scenes in this film use these writers interactions with Cassady as metaphoric markers of the passage of one era to another. In particular tensions are represented between Kesey and Kerouac. Kerouac is shown to reject the hippies who, in return, rejected him as well. Interestingly, Alan Ginsberg, who not only knew Cassady but also enjoyed relevance from one era to another, and was friends with Kesey himself, was not mentioned until 50 minutes into the film. The film is thus two travel narratives, first On the Road and Pranksters On the Bus.

Much of the movie is a simulation of 1960s film footage of the Prankster's cross-country bus trip or of a Ken Kesey party where Kesey pressures a drunken 1960s Keuroac to take acid. This shift in perspective and in media is a technique for conveying a sense of authenticity, and here it also refers to the hours and hours of film the pranksters shot of their voyage, film that was never edited into a proper film but nevertheless has found its way into countless documentaries about the 1960s.

The jazz music soundtrack largely signifies the beat era even if the film's emphasis is on the 1960s and psychedelia.

irish nationalism - 2008 - Hunger

Hunger
Steve McQueen
2008
Film4 Productions
96 Min.

Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger is about the 1981 IRA hunger strikes that took place in Long Kesh prison that resulted in ten dead men, including Bobby Sands, who was elected to British parliament before his death. Hunger was probably one of the best films of 2008 and was almost certainly better than all of the Academy Award best picture nominees of that year.

Long Kesh prison included a set of buildings called the H-Blocks, 'H' shaped structures where IRA prisoners were held. During the late 1970s and early 80s, the IRA prisoners waged a series of protests within the H-Blocks to obtain political prisoner or political status and its associated privileges. McQueen's film, representing these protests, is composed of two long segments. The first features the blanket protest, where prisoners went without clothing to protest their being denied civilian clothing in prison, and also the dirty protest, when prisoners kept their body waste in their cells. The second segment represents the hunger strike with an emphasis on the experience of Bobby Sands, whose commitment to the strike was fatal but still intensely meaningful to those agitating for a united Irish republic. This later segment largely shows

Sands on a bed in a white room, as though he's already in heaven, an apotheosis and a counterpoint to the hell depicted in the first segment of the film.The two sections are divided by a prison meeting-room conversation, about the hunger strike, between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. This scene comprises the majority of the film's dialog. This scene is also a single take, is long, possibly nearing twenty minutes in length, and as a piece of film-making, is incredible.

The rest of the film is largely silent, there are bits of dialog here and there, but otherwise if there are vocal sounds, they're shouts of anger or pain. Otherwise the focus of the film is on the emotional intensity of the prisoner's resistance to the authority of their institutions and the minutia of prison life. The small details of the protests are emphasized, the shit on the cell walls of the dirty protest,
the insects that collect, the architecture of the prison, the damaged knuckles of the guards. This film targets the senses, with disgusting smells, textures, and tastes implied through much of the visual imagery, and the aural compressed into the dialogue scene. The dark and filthy aesthetic of the film in its representation of these protests recalls music videos like Poison by Prodigy,

or David Fincher's video for Nine Inch Nails' Closer.

Those videos take place in a metaphor, while mcQueen's Long Kesh H-Blocks are a dramatic representation of a real and still existing site.

punk - communal living - 2005 - Mouth to Mouth

Mouth to Mouth
Alison Murray
2005
M2M Films
101 minutes

Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.

The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.

The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.

Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.

The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.

animal liberation - film - 2011 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt

Twentieth Century Fox

2011

105 min

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably among the top movies of the last two years and it is undoubtedly better than all of the nominees for Best Picture for 2011,along with The Muppets. It was certainly better than The Artist. The film provides the backstory to the “classic” sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes which Rise also far outshines. It is essentially a story of animal evolution propelled by human technology, resulting in armed revolution by animals against humans.

The story begins with a research scientist who conducts studies on chimpanzees pertaining to an alzheimer's treatment that may not only restore the subject’s brain functioning but even increase intelligence. This scientist has an ailing father whose suffering drives his son’s urgency to achieve success in his research.  One of the first successful test subjects, a chimp called Bright Eyes by the research team, goes on a rampage in defense of her infant son, and is killed right at the moment when the scientist is presenting his research to a corporate board meeting. The scientist then takes care of the infant chimpanzee, whom he names Caesar, and subsequently realizes that this young ape had inherited the superior intelligence of his mother.

The scientist administers the chimp-tested treatments to his father, whose condition improves. The father, Cesaer’s adoptive grandfather, shows the most emotion and concern for Caesar, and his quality of life, out of all of the film’s human characters. The elder man and the young ape experience their life changes at the same time, and at the moment when the grandfather relapses into alzheimers, Caesar is put into an ape refuge, a moment that comes after Caesar had defended his elder from a bullying neighbor. The moment of the grandfather’s death is also the moment where Caesar becomes that refuge’s alpha male.  This kind of pattern is interesting as it also charts the rise of the ape - as, of course, Caesar inevitably becomes a leader of an ape uprising, first against their refuge handlers, and then against law enforcement - against the decline of man, who, by film’s end, die out as a virus that the apes are resistant to spreads across the world along international flightpaths.  

Earlier in this post I referred to The Artist, and I think it is important to note that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is just one example of a movie that effectively carries the silent film, in part, into the present era. Rather than being some corny pastiche of 1920s era Hollywood, Rise shows the animals behave in often intensely expressive ways without verbally communicating. The emotions and meanings expressed by the apes are clearly conveyed by facial and bodily gestures, and the actions of the apes are clear as well. Whole tracts of the film are gripping in their portrayal of animal suffering without any words being exchanged or even human characters present to speak on their behalf.  

The uprising of the ape’s is a great scene. First, it includes aspects of revolutionary activity which are often neglected in other representations. For example, the apes have a symbol for their movement, the design of the windowframe from the attic of the scientist’s house where Caesar grew up. There’s a whole motif of looking through windows and glass in this film that may provide the base material for a film studies student’s course paper someday! Furthermore, the apes in revolt almost immediately find a revolutionary hero-martyr in the gorilla of the refuge who hurled himself at a helicopter machine-gunner - bringing down the aircraft even though it killed him. Meanwhile, Caesar is the quintessential revolutionary leader (with strands from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces), who fearlessly fights his enemies with whatever means are at hand while unfolding brilliant strategies to defeat the San Francisco Police Department with limited manpower and weaponry. It seemed as though the apes won their fight against well armed and armoured men with few casualties and little effort. Finally, Caesar also feels intensely for his people, as shown when he cradles the body of the fallen gorilla after the battle had ended.  

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably the great film of animal liberation, imagining a fantasy of the animals liberating themselves at the same time that humanity falls, never to oppress or exploit apes again.

football hooligans - film - 2008 - Cass

Cass
Jon S. Baird
Cass Films
2008
108 minutes

Cass is a biographical film based on the life of Cass Pennant, one of the best known participants in the English “football Hooligan” or ‘casual’ subculture of the 1970s and 80s (which isn’t to say that the subculture is currently dormant) wherein hardcore fans of specific soccer teams would fight each other in the streets when their chosen teams would play. The film is directed by Jon S. Baird who, according to iMDB, has also worked on one of the few other casual films, Green Street Hooligans, and directed a short about the subject earlier in his film career titled It’s a Casual Life.  Most directors of drama have little to do with the subject matter of their films however the recurrence of this subculture as content in Baird’s career suggests he might have direct knowledge of his material. There aren’t many films about the casuals and Baird is involved with two.

The film is largely a positive look at the phenomenon of unorganized Football violence, which puts it in league with Green Street Hooligans and The Football Factory, neither of which really represent the subculture negatively. Cass Pennant was a Jamaican orphan, abandoned by his mother and then adopted by aged pensioners in an all-white neighborhood. He bonded with his elderly adoptive father over football matches and entered the hooligan scene when he fought alongside West Ham United supporters against the Wolverhampton Wolves (also called the Subway Army or the Subway Wolves, they were supporters of the Wolverhampton Wanderers FC).  Following this melee, Pennant joined the Inter City Firm (the Casual club that fought for West Ham), and eventually became a leader to the group. 

From the film, Cass and his crew advancing on their enemies!

The film follows the predictable life of a prominent Football Hooligan, featuring scenes of violence (of course) and prison terms (of course). Baird’s film, however, also creates the sense of an emotional and intellectual life for an individual who, as a celebrity of a subculture known primarily for its brutality, was undoubtedly portrayed as a lizard-brained thug for much of his life. Cass is often shown in the film to be critiquing the misunderstandings of mainstream media (and other observers) of the Casuals, and takes to the writing of his autobiography and his personal views on the subculture as a challenge to outsider perspectives. The real Cass Pennant published his bio in 2002 but has gone on to write a number of books on Football Hooligans, to greatly expand a body of literature that was once made up of only Bill Buford’s gonzo-esque Among The Thugs (which portrays the Hooligans as the mindless attack-drones of Working-class spectatorship).  Cass also shows its subject’s sadness over the death of his father as well as his struggles in maintaining his life as ICF leader while starting a family.  

One interesting aspect of the film is the aspect of the business cards the ICF members carried that said “Congratulations - you have just met a member of the Inter City Firm”.  Outlaw Biker clubs also developed this practice.

radical media - film - 2000 - Cecil B. Demented

Cecil B. Demented
John Waters
Studio Canal+
2000
87 Minutes

Roger Ebert bothered to give a this movie a poor review, commenting on its poor acting and the sense it creates that its the result of a group of friends goofing around.  These charges can be levelled against ANY John Waters film, but there’s a mild sense of jouissance in that he said it about this particular anti-Hollywood Waters production.  John Waters is one of a few reknown countercultural filmmakers.  His work is always transgressive, willfull schlock, hence William S Burroughs honoured the director by naming him the “Pope of Trash.”  One of the recurring themes in Waters work is the blending of the transgressive with the transcendant in what is often a weird and carnivalesque spectacle augmented by intentionally low production values.

This film’s central character, Cecil B. Demented, is a terrorist film director who is followed by a crew of violent movie revolutionaries who seek to dismantle the system that produces mainstream films.  Each crew member is tattooed with the name of one of the great non-mainstream auteurs of cinema, including “David Lynch” (on the art director’s knuckles) and the occultist director, Kenneth Anger (across the chest of the satanist, recalling Anger’s own chest tattoo that reads ‘lucifer’).  

Each crew member has a unique anti-social personality which they bring to the whole, drug abuse, deviant sexuality, a relentless will to violence, they’re all represented in Demented’s crew.  The crew kidnap a major Holywood film star and make her the central figure in their film, recalling the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst (who appears in this film) by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The film operates as an exaggerated telling of some of Water’s own methods of filmmaking.  In a 1988 documentary about Waters he discusses how he would jump out a car, shoot a scene with Divine on the Baltimore sidewalk, then jump back into the car.  

Cecil B. Demented’s directorial methods are similar, except that he threatens outsiders to his crew with death if they don’t participate according to his orders.  Demented's goal is to achieve a representation of "real terror" in film.  To make a film in such a way, with a Hollywood star, is perhaps a fantasy to film terrorists everywhere.  The film progresses in such a way that Melanie Griffith's superstar character becomes integrated into the group to the extent that she starts participating in the havoc they wreack. and many of the crew (including Demented) die over the course of a number of shootouts and violent melees with opposing forces, including the Baltimore Police, the Teamsters, and the security personnel of the theaters the Demented crew raids.  

The group bonds tighten over these shootouts (even as they shed members) and the Hollywood star becomes one of them.  They also bond over rituals as each member forments their dedication to the group by being branded with a group logo (they already have the director-name tattoos as a group thing) and howilng “demented forever.”  Cecil B. Demented displays a group fanatically dedicated to an art form, and intertwining terror and art in a way that recalls Don DeLillo’s art and terrorism novels, Mao II and Falling Man, except that for Waters, the terror is combined with fun.  Ultimately, even though most of the Demented crew dies, they succeed, because they finished shooting their film.

red army faction - film - 2008 - The Baader-Meinhof Complex

The Baader Meinhoff Complex
2008
150 minutes
directed by Uli Edel

   The Baader-Meinhoff Complex is a 2008 film directed by the German director, Uli Edel, who I otherwise only know from a mediocre 1989 film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn.  In this film he creates a partial and fragmented dramatic history of the Red Army Faction which serves to display them as violent freedom fighters without much critique of their methods.  The result is that quasi-Marxist terrorists are portrayed as the heroes of an action movie.  Whether or not this was the director’s intention was unclear, but this film conveys a similar cinematic vocabulary to the Star Wars films. 

The Red Army Faction were a group of West German based Marxist rebels active during the 1960s into the 1970s.  The RAF believed in armed struggle and may be interpreted as a European analogue to a similar American group called The Weathermen. The title of this film referrs to the alternative name for the group, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, referring to its two best known members, Andreas Baader, and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The film depicts these two figures as engaged in a dialectical struggle of thought vs action which is a perrennial issue manifest in the rhetoric of activism.  Ulrike Meinhoff was a brilliant journalist with far-left leanings who became the intellectual voice of the group while Baader was a criminal with little education, and formed the id of the group consciousness.  Baader is represented as uninterested in political concerns in any way that does not appear superficial, and rather appears to sense that action is the most important course to take.  

While Baader and Meinhof appear to represent the two poles of the group, (and serve as metaphors for the two poles of all of radical politics) there is a third major character, Klassen Grundun, poised between the two best known group members, who may actually represent the axel of the unstable unit.  In Edel’s film, Grundun nurtures Baader’s will to violence, even if its directed towards ridiculous gestures such as an arson attack on a department store.  Grudnen also shames Meinhoff into committing to violent revolutionary action by ridiculing her profession.  Finally, Gruden pacifies Baader when he succumbs to his rage at group meetings, and recalls the exact perfect Mao Tse-Tung quotation to recite to the group to steel their resolve in a hard time.  She is the unacknowledged force that drives the group, while Baader is portrayed as the same kind of reckless wildman  archetype that propels every movie.

The film goes from scene to scene depicting the most dramatic periods of the group’s existence, without getting bogged down in any socio-political details that might take away from its pace or action.  Bombings, retaliations, the capture of the RAF by police, trial and deaths as well as a few episodes from the 2nd and 3rd generations of the RAF are all depicted, transposed into movie convention reasonably well by Edel.  The origins of the group are uncertain in the film, Ulrike Meinhoff appears to join the Red Army Faction sometime after an encounter with an incarcerated Gunden, but otherwise the terrorist cell appeared to have already existed, already bombing things that have no connection to their political cause.  So any reason for its existence is left unstated, and they appear to commit acts of politically motivated violence for unspecified or poorly articulated reasons.  Occasional quotes from Meinhoff’s writings aside, the intellectual side of the group is subsumed in the film by the spectacle of explosions.  The RAF’s prehistory, the allusion that these were the children of the Third Riech, generation, is a mere statement on the back of the DVD case.  It may be something worth exploring, but it’s not given any meaning in the film.  Instead, the group’s post-formation history is mined as a source of action packed scenes with the terrorists poised as heroes.

Edel’s film displays a terrorist group that is active in a Western democracy without justifying its existence.  Still, Edel constructs his RAF characters as sympathetic figures simply by humanizing them while portraying the police they fight with as nameless hordes.  The Red Army Faction appear as youthful, energetic fighters, while their enemies are the anonymous henchmen of old men who sit and dryly plot at a conference table.  

    The historical significance of the RAF can be set aside, really, as this film is little more than an action movie that unfortunately takes a complicated semi-Marxist terrorist organization as its subject matter.  In real life, police authority and liberal-democratic social organization continues to dominate western countries.  Recent films that use countercultural groups, if not armed rebel movements such as the RAF, as their subject matter, consistently portray such groups sympathetically, if not outright heroically.  Why is there such disparity between dramatic representations of such subject matter, and actual social attitudes towards the sorts of groups being represented?