Film & Music. Punk.

In a punk-themed issue of the Guardian's Film & Music section this week, Alex Cox quotes Luis Buñuel looking back on Surrealism:

The movement was successful in its details and a failure in its essentials. Surrealism was a cultural and artistic success, but these were the areas of least importance to the surrealists. Our aim was not to establish a glorious place for ourselves in the annals of art and literature - and certainly not in the cinema! - but to CHANGE THE WORLD. This was our essential purpose, and we completely failed.

"What Buñuel wrote of the surrealists is equally true of punk," writes Cox. "Whether a money-making scam or revolutionary movement, punk was decisively and swiftly killed by the double-whammy of the music business: CDs and pop videos. In the cinema, punk's presence was even more tentative." So then he asks, "What would a punk cinema look like, if one still existed?" Rules for breaking the rules follow.

Stuart Jeffries tells the story behind Derek Jarman's Jubilee.

"I recently discovered that I'm in The Filth and the Fury DVD eating cake and talking to Sid," muses Jez Scott. "I've been a policeman for 20 years - I'm a sergeant now - but I'm still a punk, as are a lot of coppers. I still go to gigs and crowd-surf with my boss. He's an inspector."

Keith Cameron: "Australian punk happened for the same reasons as British and American punk: a sense of disillusionment with what was on offer, musically and socially. But unlike the UK and US scenes, which were concentrated in London and New York, where musicians could feed off each other, Australian punks were scattered across the vastness of the country, and had only the flimsiest idea of what punk even meant."

Laura Barton sets out in search of the spirit of a groundbreaking tune, "Roadrunner," by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

Dave Simpson: "If 1977 was the year of the punk rock explosion, it also saw the rise of another musical movement, intimately entwined with punk - a massive eruption in British reggae, which became the black counterpart to the white heat of punk."

"Many years ago, when the cold war was still a recent memory and John Major lived on Downing Street, I bought a copy of Greil Marcus's book Lipstick Traces, the 'secret history of the 20th century' that draws ornate lines between the Sex Pistols, the French Situationists and Dadaism, and remains awe-inspiringly great - 'a coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out,' according to the venerable Terry Eagleton, and he should know." John Harris explains why he's writing about "Kleenex, once fleetingly cracked up to be the 'Swiss Slits' and forced to change their name to Liliput (which should actually be written LiLiPUT, apparently) by the international tissue manufacturers. They lasted from 1978 until 1983, and have since been pretty much lost to history." But I want to add this: In a few days, I'll be bringing up the subject of docs that need to be made. My nomination: Lipstick Traces.

Posted by dwhudson at July 20, 2007 5:42 AM