This short piece links recent calls for an understanding of intersectionality and thinking about connections between subcultures and movements, specifically punk and queer sensibilities in subcultural filmmaking.
In the light of the latest stimulating discussions around movement-building (one example here is the Teach-in with Angela Davis and Naomi Klein organized by The Rising Majority), we are reminded of the necessity for intersectional thinking in the way we engage with the critical arenas that we find access to. The recent piece, Queer As Punk: A Guide To LGBTQIA+ Punk on NPR by Jayna Brown and Tavia Nyong’o, who extensively worked on the intersections of punk, feminism and queer thought, features a great list of songs that represent the musical intersections between queer and punk subcultures. Brown and Nyong’o emphasize that the queer history of punk has been reflected in music for years since – and even before – the “official” punk moment, if we know where to look.
This is also true for cinema. There are relatively recent documentaries out there which demonstrate that punk history cannot be thought as monolithic, especially in terms of race, gender and sexuality, such as the relatively older Afro-Punk (2003), A Band Called Death (2012), Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution (2017), Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits (2017) and the upcoming Poly Styrene documentary (it has been crowd-funded!) Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché.
These works reveal how exclusion from subcultural spaces does not only happen via a deliberate dismissal but also on the level of canonization – how the constant reiterations of the same stories and historicizations function towards concreting a specific visibility, rendering other stories “the other” or “the marginalized”. We are at a time that “the others” can do it themselves, now the systemic impositions of power structures are being challenged to a point of disintegration, i.e. the abolitionist movement’s current force. It is possible to find similar challenges taking shape in the territory of moving image and screen media; videos and films are becoming crucial in the documentation of an important moment that initiates a political action, a movement or a call to critique the rules of visibility in popular and social media.
In this vein, media that is created not just for the purpose of documentation, or as a result of an impulsive wish to “capture the moment”, but also in order to manifest an artistic, collective/individual response to oppression, contributes to the structures of visibility. Some pre-digital filmmaking can be inspiring in this sense in order to reflect on the diverse subcultural filmmaking practices from the late 70s outside of English-speaking punk circles, particularly in terms of the ways in which queer and punk subcultures intersected in these “other” spaces and entered, perhaps forcefully, into the popular media.
Pedro Almodovar’s filmography is an interesting example in terms of making use of popular culture and camp in the articulation of patriarchal taboos, blurring the borders of identity and sexuality on different levels. But it is his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), that provides an insight into a punk collectivity behind filmmaking and is embedded in the Madrid punk movement’s la movida madrilena. His subcultural environment at the time comes across as a solution to the restrictions of working within low-budget conditions. The punk methods of the film – camp, kink, parody, collage, pop TV sequences – are fundamental coping mechanisms in this process. The specific political environment of post-Franco Madrid from which the film emerged was largely different from our current atmosphere, however parallels can be made in terms of seeking radical creativities within the underground. The type of collectivity this collage-esque low-budget queer aesthetic manifests can be inspiring for us to think about creative coping mechanisms within our own environments.
As a product of my larger research around intersectional approaches to subcultural filmmaking and specifically the de-canonization of “punk cinema”, I discuss Almodovar’s punk methods and queerness through Pepi, Luci, Bom in a recent article.
You can find the article here: Punk aesthetics of Pedro Almodóvar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom: Self-reflexivity, subcultural formations and queer temporalities.
Abstract
Tracing the direct and indirect influences and cultural connections between earlier counter-cultures and avant-garde art has been a useful method to historicize the aesthetics that is created by subcultures. Drawing from this approach, this article seeks to contribute to the study of the aesthetics and counter-cultures via analysing a specific cinematic self-reflexivity that is born out of the interconnectedness of low-budget material conditions and the subcultural environments. The contention is that Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), embodies such punk aesthetics and queer temporalities, through the temporary disruptions in narrative progression, the abundance of queer parody, the combination of camp, TV ads, musical performance and the non-diegetic insertions of comic book-style textuality. In this collage, the politics of realistic representation are thrown out of the picture via a deliberate coupling of artificiality and spontaneity. This article argues that the embeddedness of Pepi, Luci, Bom in Madrid’s subcultural movement, la movida madrileña, demonstrates perfectly how subcultural experience gives way to an aesthetic coping mechanism that transforms low-budget restrictions into self-reflexivity. The disparate narrative vantage points in the film that rupture linearity and how the subcultural environment prompted disruptive entrances through which the film’s satire emerged are taken as critical-aesthetic offerings of queer temporalities that exude through the experiential knowledge of exclusion and oppression.
Watch Pepi, Luci, Bom’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqox5M8HHdw
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz