Afro-Punk.

For the Voice, Aaron Hillis previews the Afro-Punk Festival, running at BAM from tomorrow through Wednesday: "Among the screening highlights are self-explanatory doc portraits (A Panther in Africa, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple), auteur rarities (Larry Clark's 1977 jazz-man drama Passing Through, Jules Dassin's Up Tight!), and a sidebar honoring Renaissance man Bill Gunn (director of blaxploitation art-horror Ganja & Hess, and writer of Hal Ashby's The Landlord)."

Updated through 7/8.

For background, turn to Steve Dollar in the New York Sun: "Ever since he began screening his documentary Afro-Punk in 2003, former Brooklyn resident James Spooner has become a conduit for a generation that often feels stuck in a cultural divide. The 32-year-old filmmaker shot the music documentary out of a need both to connect with and expose a nation of folks like himself — fans of indie-rock and punk-inspired do-it-yourself culture who are often the only minorities in a minority culture."

At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully braves a second viewing of Jonestown: "[N]ot a week has gone by when I haven't thought about [Stanley] Nelson's film." It "recreates, with frightening immediacy, a moment in history when evil arrived on Earth to destroy the hopes and dreams of so many well-intentioned, decent individuals."

Update, 7/4: At Hammer to Nail, Brandon Harris reviews Ganja & Hess, "the anti-Blacula, defiantly difficult and parochial, a vampire film in which the word itself is never used and its tropes mostly discarded. Ganja & Hess is jolting, jagged, lyrical, mythic and utterly unclassifiable, as avant-garde as the most independent film of today or any of the New American Cinema work from the 1960s or audacious studio films of the 1970s, with resonances one isn't likely to encounter ever again."

Update, 7/5: Afro-Punk "truly draws into question as much about race relations in modern America as it does about independent cinema or the craft of filmmaking itself," writes Evan Louison. "[I]t is as much about New York, and the art and skateboarding communities in the city as it is about the worlds it spawned from - those of punk music, resistant Black culture and independent film. This year's slate of films is no different."

Updates, 7/7: "Revisiting Uptight... is like opening a time capsule," writes Robert Cashill. "Some of what's inside has faded away, but much of it has a surprising, close-to-the-ground vitality."

Michael Tully picks out the highlights so far and yet to come.

Update, 7/8: Karina Longworth reports on a feisty Q&A following a screening of I'm Through With White Girls.

Posted by dwhudson at July 3, 2008 1:06 PM