DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Director Jem Cohen spent the better part of 10 years – the bulk of the band’s existence – periodically documenting D.C. post-punk legends Fugazi. In 1999, Cohen took all that footage, plus some that had been recovered from very early shows, and compiled it into a sprawling, non-linear and often experimental look at the band. It was a little divisive at the time of its release, as some wished for a more straightforward biographical approach that they probably should never really have expected from the band, and certainly not from Cohen.
I always felt like this was the perfect Fugazi document, though. The film aesthetically aligns with the musical direction the band had gone into by the late-90s, becoming more experimental themselves, exploring unusual instrumentation, new ways of creating sounds, and delving into Jamaican-dub-influenced studio techniques. Yet still, remarkably, sounded recognizably like the same band who 10 years prior were making shout-along guitar anthems that stressed the hardcore more than the “post” in post-hardcore.
Cohen’s film takes material from a diverse array of formats — from scratchy old videos, to warm, grainy super-8, to some really glorious 16mm live footage — and takes a dub-inspired approach to visual and sonic storytelling, with unexpected, sometimes abstract clips juxtaposed with more traditional interviews or live footage. True to the band’s constant efforts to engage fans as more than just a sea of faces in a darkened room, Cohen not only makes the fans part of the film via interviews, but also through his own motion-picture portraiture, as he holds extended shots of people at shows as they stare into his camera. The effect is an essential, and strikingly intimate part of a film that is often an impressionistic reflection of the band rather than a band documentary in any traditional sense.
Here’s a clip of the band playing “Shut the Door” from the film, a favorite of mine from the live performances in the film, and one of the few songs in the film that Cohen allows to play from start to finish.
Sunday at 5 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Jem Cohen will be on hand for a Q&A, along with Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto. (I’d heard a rumor at one point that it was to be the whole band, but that, like most reports of getting all four of these guys on a stage together again, turned out to be wishful thinking.) Free. Seating is available on a first come, first serve basis, with doors opening a half hour before the screening.
