Revisiting early punk cinema

Abstract

This article outlines the main discussions around punk aesthetics and the culture of commodification, tracing the methods of punk's canonization back to the two early films that have been considered within the documentary genre and described as ‘transparent’ mainly due to their low-budget conditions: The Punk Rock Movie (Don ) and The Blank Generation (Amos Poe and Ivan Král, ). As this ‘punk cinema’ canon stems from a larger standardization of punk history, this article firstly presents the criticisms around the dominant narratives in the discourse around punk and the role of subjectivity in their writing. Drawing from deconstructive perspectives that give room to think about the relationship between punk and representation beyond the canon, I look at the ignored aspects of early punk cinema that involve a reliance on the cinematic referential codes of the heteronormative gaze, echoing the media sensationalism of the time. The Punk Rock Movie’s overlooked cinematic engagement with the media representations of punk and The Blank Generation’s approximation to cinema verité are both analysed in relation to how they textually engage with the ‘immediacy’ of the environment. In this analysis, the abundance of concert and archive footage comes across as an overriding effect in the reception of the two films. Expanding on Stacy Thompson’s adoption of Roland Barthes’s textual analysis in theorizing punk cinema, this article reconnects with what is actually ‘self-reflexive’ about these films as well as aiming to uncover how their overshadowing sense of transparency is constructed.