Making art is hard work, even when you’re just goofing off with your friends. No matter how silly a collaborative art project is on a conceptual level—a novelty punk band, an amateur movie blog, a Mardi Gras costuming krewe (to name the few I have personal experience with)—the practicalities of seeing it through gets mired down in the general bullshit drudgery of modern life. Between everyone’s duties to work, to family, and to personal health and well-being, real-life circumstances are always stacked against your success, which can make you question why you’re working so hard for something so silly as, say, organizing a meet-up for a small group of friends to dress as Divine on Mardi Gras day. It does feel great when everything clicks in to place, though. There are few victories sweeter than defying the odds or our modern capitalist hellscape by making something sublimely stupid with your friends.
Even by my personal standards, the communal art project documented in Grand Theft Hamlet is exceedingly inane. “Filmed” entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto Online during the early lockdown years of COVID-19 (in the style of We Met in Virtual Reality), Grand Theft Hamlet documents the efforts of two goofball British blokes to organize a staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the gaming platform. It’s an absurdly specific novelty project that quickly leads to a broader story about how hard it is to complete any piece of collaborative art. All the usual roadblocks of squeezing in rehearsals around work schedules, balancing personal obsession with familial obligation, and navigating contributors’ differing excitement levels to distribute labor according to enthusiasm all apply to meeting online to recite Shakespeare while digitally represented as archetypal sex workers & thugs. Only, the video game platform literalizes those obstacles in the form of outside players firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to goof off with your friends.
The tradition of adapting Shakespeare in a novelty setting is long & storied. Even the modern specificity of Grand Theft Auto can’t make this staging a total anomaly, since a digital office-building setting will instantly recall Hamlet (2000) or a burst of neon-lit gunfire will recall Romeo+Juliet (1996). I’m sure there have also been unpermitted guerilla productions of Shakespeare plays periodically shut down by the cops, even if those cops are usually not algorithmically generated NPCs. It’s the effort that Sam Crane & Mark Oosterveen (along with central documentarian Pinny Grylls) put into working around the intended purpose of GTA Online that affords the project its true uniqueness. The triumphant perseverance of a player shouting their lines over machine gunfire during rehearsal while fellow collaborators play defense against disruptive trolls & “griefers” adds a new obstacle to the usual “Let’s put on a show!” artistic sprit. The defiance of carrying on in those chaotic circumstances is energizing, inspiring an actor to shout “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” into the digital void.
Hamlet proves to be an apt play to stage for this ludicrous project, not least of all because its tragic Shakespearean violence fits right in with the basic control functions of GTA. The actual themes of the play are genuinely felt in the final edit, especially in scenes where Crane & Oosterveen slip into suicidal ideation thanks to the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns or when GTA‘s in-universe superhero franchise Impotent Rage is advertised in block letters on billboards & slot machines. The most critical Shakespeare quote repeated in this particular staging, however, isn’t from Hamlet at all. It’s the Macbeth line about how life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That pretty much sums up the whole project, from the proudly idiotic premise to the meaningless displays of violence to the general, persistent emptiness of being alive. It’s also a succinct explanation of why it’s so important to make dumb art projects with your friends despite the effort required to pull it off. Nothing matters anyway; you might as well have a little fun while you’re here.
Collecting over three years of footage, 1998 saw the release of Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Foxcatcher, Capote)’s hilarious documentary The Cruise, centering around oddball New Yorker Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Throughout the 90s, Levitch was a guide for various New York sightseeing tours; during the time in which the doc was filmed, he was working for Gray Line, with whom he has a contentious relationship, while he and a former co-worker fondly recall having worked for Apple Tours in the past. The film takes its title from Levitch’s life philosophy about “cruising” (no relation), an idiosyncratic ideology about how life “should” flow. This approach to life finds Levitch working twenty hours a week giving tours (no more, no less) and spending the rest of his time enjoying “the cruise.” In many ways, his belief system is more about what systems and concepts he defines as being “anti-cruise,” which range from the obvious examples like the institution of policing, to more personal examples like people who have personally wronged him and Gray Line for instituting the use of work uniform shirts, to more esoteric instances like the NYC grid pattern.
Levitch’s New York is a more complex presentation than we normally get, as most of the people who are interested in showing off “their” New York usually follow a virtually identical script where they fellate the city to the point of apotheosis. I don’t have any particular dislike for the city—I quite enjoy myself there—but in all cities there is a vocal chorus about how their city is the best city in the world, baby! (For those of you based in Swampflix’s home of New Orleans, you’ll recognize this hometown tendency from the number of shirts that say “Only New Orleans is real, everything else is smoke and mirrors,” etc.) Like most of the things that people consider to be unique about their city, this is not unique to New York, but because of the sheer amount of our shared media that is produced there, it is the one whose citizen propaganda is often spread farthest and widest. As such, I don’t blame anyone who’s sick of it, but this is a piece of filmic art that shows something a little different, a more thoughtful, critical, and nuanced portrait of a city that could only come from one particular point of view.
Of course, that’s not to say that the New York of Levitch and Miller still exists. As a document of the end of the twentieth century, the film is in fascinating conversation with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a collection of essays about the New York that was and its counterpoint in the New York that is, mostly drawing attention to the way that the Giuliani administration transformed the city into a real estate investment and playground for the rich and helped to institutionalize and cement the strata of class difference. Levitch is a man who is homeless but never unhoused, gliding (or rather, cruising) through life as a series of couch surfing and house sitting adventures, sustaining his lifestyle through the delivery of screeds for and against the city to a captive audience. Levitch’s NYC is ephemeral and fleeting, and nowhere is this more present than in a notable sequence in which Levitch tells someone that one of his favorite activities is to go to the plaza between the World Trade Center towers and spin around until he makes himself dizzy, then lie down on the ground and look up at them so that he feels like they’re falling down on top of him.
We get a great taste for what a tour from Levitch would be like, as he pontificates how many blocks apart certain writers and other artists lived from where they are passing, about the unity of those actors and playwrights in a singular city and in a singular past is less interesting than the difference and distance between those thinkers in space and time. Art and artistry are delineated through proximity but not bound together by it, except in the ways that Levitch weaves together disparate facts into a cohesive whole. He’s obviously well-versed in the city’s rich history, with him occasionally delivering off-the-cuff lessons in architecture to the documentarian following him on the street during his “off hours.” He calls attention to the undulation of the curves of ceramic building shells—better than stone because of its lighter weight and easier affixation to the steel that undergirds the construction—and then, in a kind of religious spasm, compares the curvature of the building to the shape of a woman and makes noises of rapture. He describes the “utter catharsis” of architecture as phallic enterprise in the body of the Empire State Building from within “its silhouette.” He’s exactly the kind of person that it’s wonderful to be able to observe from a distance, to get to know through the remove of the camera lens, because while he’s very funny and is a fantastic entertainer, he is exactly the kind of person one would imagine has an energy that it would be difficult to be in the presence of for longer than the length of a sightseeing tour.
Levitch is a person who’s too much of a character to be fictional, a man who, if he were generated from the mind of an author, would be too grating and strange for us to identify with, but because he is a real person in our real world, we must accept his existence as fact. A font of unconventional wisdom with a vast knowledge of history and literature, there are moments when I found myself identifying with him very much. There’s a particularly fun bit near the end in which Levitch goes on a tirade about all of the people who have wronged him in his life, from unrequited childhood crushes to teachers to members of his family, and it’s wonderful stuff. I’m sorry that I never got the chance to get a tour from Levitch, even if I can’t help but wonder if I’d ever fully recover from the experience. As the film is currently in re-release, the local arthouse where I attended a screening noted that they had reached out to the distributor to see if it would be possible to have Levitch do a Q&A or even just videoconference in for an introduction. Apparently, the distributor said that this was far from the first request of this kind that they had fielded, but that “[they]’re having trouble finding him.” What a legacy; in fact, I fear that having to comment on this might be too anti-cruise for him to want to participate, so there’s a part of me that hopes they never find him, and he’s still out there, unfettered.
It’s likely cliché to describe any movie’s editing style as being similar to jazz, but in the case of Soundtrack to a Coup d’État the descriptor is literal. The anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums overlay news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes in this essay-style documentary film, which covers the CIA’s efforts to rebrand the Cold War as a “Cool War” by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from its conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government. While political figures of the era as formidable & dissonant as Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Malcolm X weigh in on the UN machinations that led to the CIA’s conspiracy to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the soundtrack to that coup is provided by formidable & dissonant jazz greats of the era: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and, most improbably, Louis Armstrong. That soundtrack is not a formalistic choice made by director Johan Grimonprez so much as it is the core of his subject. He details how those musicians were manipulated into working as semi-official “jazz ambassadors” for Black American culture in African nations that recently joined the UN, and how those ambassadors of Cool were used to distract from and cover for the planned execution of a newly sovereign foreign leader.
There’s a sharp specificity to this doc’s subject, walking the audience through how African nations newly inducted into the United Nations were seen as a threat to be squashed by paranoid US leadership. Their power within the UN as a young, organized voting block was especially threatening to the US government’s interests, since it relied on those nations remaining colonized so they could be mined for uranium supplies in the ongoing nuclear Cold War against the Communist Bloc. Each subversive maneuver to ensure Belgium’s continued rule over the Congo is thoroughly documented in the onscreen text that interrupts the archival clips, often with page numbers & footnotes to encourage further research on your own time. What Khrushchev describes as the “cacophony” of jazz guides the everything-goes, free-association editing style of that archival footage, so that the film ends up snapshotting the greater context of late-50s & early-60s global culture outside its duty to detail the step-by-step progress of its titular coup. By the time Khrushchev is making jokes about visiting Disney World in a press conference attended by Marilyn Monroe, it plays like an alternate version of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy made for lefty academics: an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania that captures & compresses the moral & political rot of an entire era.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s focus on the CIA’s appropriation & manipulation of Black American artists recalls a few other recent documentaries about the politics of Black artistic life in the US,namely Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and I Am Not Your Negro. It distinguishes itself from that cluster of radical docs by slightly shifting focus away from Civil Rights clashes of the 1960s to a different form of racist US state violence, but it’s still racist US state violence all the same. Grimonprez uses a key Malcolm X clip to link the two struggles, in which the activist encourages his audience to get angrier about the US’s violence abroad instead of just the Civil Rights struggle at home, emphasizing that foreign governments are dropping American bombs on Americans’ behalf. All efforts to de-colonize are worth supporting, but it’s especially egregious to ignore the ones suppressed by bombs bearing your country’s name. That line of thought has obvious current relevance in the continued bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military—backed by US weapons supplies—resonating just as loudly as the continued cultural racism of the US and the continued, aggressive unpredictability of jazz. It’s a documentary about a very specific political moment in time, but the global fight for post-colonial freedom smashes through that temporal window.
If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view. There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime. The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition. David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City. They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex. For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home. There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.
One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era. All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education. Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc. It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers. However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury. The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.
I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons. You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as. When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision. The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts. This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values. All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage. I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.
Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their schedule. This year, only the gross-out Juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp grabbed my attention from that section of the program, and I look forward to reviewing that film with regular podcast guest Bill Arceneaux later this month. Otherwise, the most exciting selections at this year’s NOFF were all documentaries, at least from what I could gather scrolling through blurbs & thumbnails on the festival’s website. All of the movies I ventured out to see on my own this year happened to be documentaries; they also all happened to feature queer themes in their subjects – sometimes subtly, often confrontationally.
So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary films I caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival. It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite
Since not all documentaries can get away with pushing the boundaries of fact or form, the medium is often most useful at its most informative rather than its most innovative. The Disappearance of Shere Hite feels like vital, vibrant documentary filmmaking without ever challenging the rules or structures of its medium; it’s simply an act of “Hey, were you aware this amazing person existed?” post-mortem publicity. Personally, I was not aware of Shere Hite’s existence before this doc’s festival run (starting way back at Sundance this January), which is something the movie assumes of anyone who’s too young to have experienced first-wave Feminism first-hand half a century ago. Shere Hite did not “disappear” in the Connie Converse sense; she only carries a similar air of mystique because the American media chose to forget her and willed her name recognition into cultural oblivion. Once upon a time, she was an important sex researcher whose debut publication The Hite Report was just as essential to American sex & romance discourse as the more formalist work of researchers like Kinsey and Masters & Johnson. That initial entry into the American sex chat was controversial in its time for reporting that most cisgender women orgasm through clitoral stimulation, not through vaginal penetration. It’s something that now registers as common, everyday knowledge but in the 1970s was treated as a vicious attack on traditional marital relations. In her most widely publicized follow-ups, she also dared to report that traditional masculine gender roles leave most men feeling dangerously lonely and that married women commit adultery just as often as married men. By that third common-sense statement, she was ridiculed out of her field by macho mob justice, fleeing to Europe so she didn’t have to hear any more angry men react to the headlines she made without ever actually reading the books she published.
Shere Hite conducted her research through self-printed sex-questionnaire zines. She was strikingly beautiful and dramatically eccentric in her fashion, making do as a nude model before reinventing herself as a D.I.Y. punk sex scientist. Her performative Old Hollywood glamour makes her an innately cinematic subject, so that there are hundreds of hours of televised interview footage to supplement the text of her writing. In a time when mainstream media was skeptically evaluating “the question of The Women’s Movement”, she devised a way to ask women what their private sexual lives were actually like in an intimately truthful approach, suggesting that there was obvious value to putting the tools of sex research in the hands of actual sex workers. I only know these things because I watched a documentary about her, even though there was a time when I could have seen her interviewed out in the open by the likes of Oprah, Geraldo, and Larry King. The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a politically sharp, oddly romantic documentary profile of an important figure the American media deliberately forgot because her challenges to traditional sex & gender dynamics were too uncomfortable to tolerate. The only thing that doesn’t fully work about the movie is Dakota Johnson’s softly precious narration as “the voice of Shere Hite” while reading her unpublished diaries between interview clips. It’s a performance that’s missing the Sandra Bernhard sass, Patricia Clarkson fierceness, and Susan Sarandon seduction of the real Shere Hite’s voice, which we often hear in direct contrast to Johnson’s. Still, having a movie star’s name attached to a woman who’s been deliberately stripped of her own name recognition is probably for the best. Anything that works towards undoing the Mandela Effect of a world without Shere Hite is worthwhile, so I can’t fault the movie (or Johnson) too much for it.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Speaking of Sundance selections about badass women who’ve fostered combative relationships with the American press, Going to Mars is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic portrait of poet-activist Nikki Giovanni. Whereas The Disappearance of Shere Hite is formally straight-forward in its linear overview of its subject’s biography & professional record, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project attempts to at least partially match the inventive fervor of its subject’s art in its own impressionistic approach (and attempts to better match her tone in its own celebrity voiceover track, provided by Taraji P. Henson). It weaves together threads of Giovanni’s current, relatively comfortable life as an aging academic with her radical past as a Civil Rights organizer and her romantic visions of a sci-fi future led by Black women. The title refers to her assertion that no one is better prepared for space exploration than Black American women, whose ancestors were already forcibly transported to an alien planet and forced to mate with an alien species. Recordings of her poetry performances are just as often paired with outer-space screensavers as they are with footage of Civil Rights protests of the 1960s & 70s. Somewhere between those two distant worlds, there’s Giovanni’s current status as a peaceful, settled citizen of suburban America – still clear-eyed in her awareness of the nation’s ongoing racial atrocities but content to leave the fight for justice to future generations. There’s great tension in the way the archival footage’s incendiary fury clashes with her current-day domestic comfort, but what’s really impressive is how sharply observed her poetry remains in both states. She’s still one of America’s great thinkers; it’s just that her observations now sound closer to Wanda Sykes stand-up than Angela Davis activism.
There’s always great tension in Nikki Giovanni’s relation to the world, whether answering Q&A softballs from well-intentioned but intellectually inferior audiences or chain-smoking while verbally sparring with an equally thorny James Baldwin. It would be inaccurate to say she has no fucks left to give in her old age, since she’s always been a no-fucks-given communicator in her art & public persona. What Going to Mars offers is a chance to celebrate that combative candidness as a personality trait beyond its political utility; it celebrates her as a great, greatly difficult person.
Anima: My Father’s Dresses
Moving on to the festival’s Virtual Cinema program (which is still running through the end of this weekend), the German documentary Anima might be the most formally experimental documentary I saw in this year’s line-up. It’s an epistolary film, functioning as a posthumous conversation between director Uli Decker and her deceased father, Helmut. There aren’t many home movies or personal photographs to illustrate the details of that conversation, though, because it’s specifically about a family secret held while Helmut was alive and able to speak for himself. So, Uli reads his words from personal diaries and sends her responses via voiceover narration, often deviating from conventional interview footage to instead indulge in roughly animated collage. It’s an intimate family portrait personalized to look like a cut & paste sketchbook, staging a conversation that could have never happened in real time due to the Catholic conservatism of their family background. The film is about the shocking death-bed reveal of a family secret, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the story it tells its audience (save for the bizarre, newsworthy circumstances of Helmut’s sudden death). The project is not so much about telling a story as it is about offering Uli a sounding board where she can work out & express the feelings her guarded relationship with her father never made room for while he was alive.
The secret Helmut guarded was that he was a crossdresser in his private life. The betrayal Uli feels about that secret being kept from her is mostly resentment that her own explorations of gender & sexuality were severely policed by her family in her youth, as a queer woman who grew up as an eccentric theatre kid. Her father felt a close affinity to her as someone who felt constrained by traditional gender roles, but never expressed that affinity in any meaningful way while alive. He hid it in journals, which she could only access after he passed. To the audience, this is not especially groundbreaking subject matter. Between the anarchic formal experimentation of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? in the 1950s and the extensive visual documentation of vintage closeted-crossdresser culture in this year’s Casa Susanna, there have been plenty of more artistically & historically substantial works to seek out before making time for Anima. Uli’s frustration with her family for playing the game of posing as a “normal” middle-class Catholic household that wouldn’t allow itself to be free & happy is the personal touch that can’t be found anywhere else, which makes it one of the few documentaries that can get away with this kind of shameless cornball navel-gazing (alongside Stories We Tell, Madame, Origin Story, etc.). I’m also a crossdresser who grew up struggling with Catholic shame, though, so maybe I’m just a hopeless sucker for this kind of material in general.
Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland
If you’re in need of an advertisement for the benefits of proud, public queerness (in opposition to self-imposed Catholic penance), NOFF also offered a short-form documentary on the local drag collective Chokehole. It even took the drag-wrestling hybrid show on the road to Germany, where the much more somber Anima is also set. I use the term “advertisement” deliberately, too, as Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland feels like the exact kind of Tourism TV commercial filmmaking that’s only available on hotel room channels, prompting you to get out of your complimentary bathrobe and contribute some vodka-soda money to the local economy. The first few Chokehole shows I attended were can’t-miss community events, the culmination of everything I love about Art: the absurdist exaggeration of gender performance in pro wrestling & dive bar drag, the half-cooked fever dream storytelling of vintage B-movies, the D.I.Y. construction of artificial worlds on no-budget sets, etc. I had ascended to genre trash heaven. By contrast, this documentary plays like an infomercial for a drag-themed amusement park. Curiously, the movie it reminds me most of was fellow globetrotting queer travel guide Queer Japan, not the sister Altered Innocence doc made by its director Yony Leyser, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution.
This aesthetic quibble isn’t a dealbreaker, exactly. The Chokehole crew totally deserves the professional spotlight they’re afforded here. I’m just hopeful this short is a proof-of-concept tease for a grander statement down the line, where the tongue-in-cheek psychedelic editing that goes into Chokehole’s live-show video packages will inform the cinema about those shows the same way The Disappearance of Shere Hite is informed by its subject’s sensual mystique, Going to Mars is informed by its subject’s combative poetry, and Anima is informed by its subject’s cloistered intimacy.
I had an unusually difficult time pinning down the intended purpose of the early-aughts punk culture documentary D.I.Y. or Die, despite its multiple subtitles’ attempts to provide context. The DVD copy of the film I picked up at my neighborhood thrift store was titled D.I.Y. or Die: Burn This DVD, proposing that this low-budget, low-effort documentary was intended to function as a kind of motion-picture zine, to be shared freely among aspiring punk artists who would benefit from its scene-specific insights & inspiration. The more official subtitle on its IMDb & Wikipedia pages is D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, which proposes that it’s more of a how-to guide for those sure-to-be-struggling punk artists, desperate for pointers on how to keep their half-shaved heads above water. The third, most robust title that populates under heavy pixelations and antiqued digital film grain effects in the movie proper is D.I.Y. or Die: “A documentary by Michael W. Dean on the means, modes, and methods on independent American artists in different genres & mediums.” That last one at least hints at the college-essay structuring of the piece, which includes an intro thesis paragraph delivered by Director Dean before he asks generic, rigidly segmented “What inspires you?” questions to an admittedly impressive collection of artists he’s roped in as talking heads. It’s the bragging rights of assembling those interviewees that gives the film its true sense of purpose, as evidenced by its DVD cover art attempting to squeeze each of their faces into a gargantuan Brady Bunch grid. D.I.Y. or Die is not the only place you can hear always-welcome punk proselytizers like Ian MacKaye, Richard Kern, and Lydia Lunch pontificate about the virtues of maintaining a D.I.Y. ethos in your outsider art, but it is a convenient check-in on how they were all holding up in the early aughts.
None of the writers, painters, sculptors, poets, musicians, or software developers interviewed here actually provide useful tips on how to survive as an independent artist. The closest the film comes to achieving that stated goal is in a DVD extra where longtime punk grumpa Steve Albini explains that it’s naive to expect a large enough audience will want or need your Art that you won’t have to maintain a day job to sustain yourself. The practicality of that sentiment is directly opposed to the vague anti-corporate rhetoric of the interviews that made it into the final edit, which mostly consist of artists wistfully explaining why they create, not how they eat or pay rent. For an actually useful guide on how to survive as an independent artist in the internet age, there’s no better resource than Matt Farley’s auto-fictional Local Legends, which sketches out a practical roadmap of how artists can have fun strategically “selling out” in minor, playful ways that keep the lights on. For its part, D.I.Y. or Die is a time capsule of the last possible minute when the countercultural betrayal of “selling out” meant something about your integrity, back when the internet was mostly made of fan pages & message boards and hadn’t yet turned the users ourselves into product via social media. There’s a tipping point between physical zine culture and intangible online ephemera incidentally documented here, both in how the DVD extras include “weblinks” to long dead URLs and how the founder of Craigslist is included alongside Ian MacKaye’s self-operated Dischord record label as if both companies were born of the same punk ethos. A more honest integration of what self-distributed art looked like in the early internet age would have included amateur pornographers instead, who are not represented here (unless you want to squint at Lunch & Kern from the most reductive angle possible). At the very least, I can’t imagine it would’ve been hard to track down Annie Sprinkle for a quick Q&A, considering how many of the contributors were filmed in NYC. Whether it’s because Dean didn’t think through why he was grouping together these exact interview subjects beyond how cool they’d be to talk to or it’s because D.I.Y. culture itself was in a confused, liminal stasis at the time, D.I.Y. or Die is unclear on what it wants to say about the state of punk culture in the early 2000s beyond “Fuck yeah.”
I don’t relish being a cynic here, two entire decades after this hour-long tribute to art-for-art’s sake creativity last meant something to anyone. If anything, I’m likely a little touchy about its intellectual laziness because it’s so similar to my own for-its-own-sake hobby of running this film blog & podcast. As an independent artistic project, Swampflix is equally confused about how to carry over zine culture ethos & aesthetics into the digital age, and I do sometimes worry that my casual, Xeroxed blogging stye comes across as the same kind of performative laziness that’s passed off as “punk” here. There’s something about the director presenting himself in wrinkled t-shirts and presenting his interviewees in unflattering, unconsidered angles & lighting that really bothers me. It’s often charming when an artist leaves noticeable fingerprints on a rough-around-the-edges work, leaving in mistakes and glimpses of the tools of production. It’s annoying when “punk” is misinterpreted as “no effort”, though, and I’m always looking for artists to use their available resources—no matter how limited—in the most passionate, effective ways possible. D.I.Y. or Die is from an earlier, easier era in online culture when self-distributed art like this motion-zine DVD could actually reach a wide, excited audience, because the digital landscape wasn’t so constantly flooded with #content — independent, corporate, or otherwise. I cut a lot of corners running this website, most notably in how often I’ll recycle the same Sharpie doodle illustrations over & over again instead of drafting new ones every post. For example, the little mohawked icon at the top of this review is a slightly doctored illustration I drew when reviewing Bulletproof Monk eight years ago, hastily edited in MS Paint. I’m not using the tools available to me to make the most effective, passionate #content I can, but I’m also a sell-out with a full-time desk job who does this stuff on the side for fun, so I don’t think I should be held to the same standards of artistic integrity. Steve Albini may have been sidelined to the DVD extras, but he still inevitably won the “debate.”
All that said, there was one aspect of D.I.Y. or Die that I did find genuinely inspiring: the inclusion of punk-scene cellist Madigan Shive. Shive enjoyed some brief notoriety in the 1990s when her band Tattle Tale was picked up by the tastemaker label Kill Rock Stars and landed a single on the foundational CD soundtrack for But, I’m a Cheerleader. Around the time D.I.Y. or Die was released in the early 2000s, her mostly-solo musical act Bonfire Madigan was an even more niche interest, which I can confirm anecdotally from having attended a concert of hers in a mostly empty Zeitgeist art gallery within a year of this documentary’s release, when my high school era obsession with her music was at its most intense. Shive is adorably earnest in her interviews here, and genuinely seems like a cool, intelligent person. What most inspired me, though, was following up after the film was over to see that she still regularly plays concerts (mostly in the Bay Area, where most of these interviews were filmed) and stays engaged with dedicated fans online, two decades since I last heard anyone say “Bonfire Madigan” out loud (besides when asking me about my now-ratty Bonfire Madigan t-shirt, purchased at that sparsely attended concert). I have no intel on whether Shive had to take the Albini advice on maintaining a day job to keep herself afloat, but I also don’t think that distinction matters. She’s continued to make passionate, independent art for decades now, regardless of the ebbs & flows of audience interest & commercial appeal, which is genuinely inspiring to me as a writer with no clear incentives left to keep writing. Maybe D.I.Y. or Die didn’t include any practical tips on how to survive as an independent artist because the only real tip you need is to “Just keep doing the work” and let momentum take care of the rest. That doesn’t mean the work shouldn’t have integrity in its artistic standards beyond the punk street cred of its production, though, which is where most of my cynicism is coming from here.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon, James, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, including the exhaustive direct-to-video erotic thriller documentary We Kill for Love (2023).
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Maysles Brothers’ door-to-door Bible salesmen documentary Salesman (1969)
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