The following essay by Ray Carney on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City accompanies a 2-disc DVD release from Benten Films out this week of Quiet City and Katz’s first film, Dance Party, USA. Mainstream film is so much an art of the maximum – the biggest, the flashiest, the fastest, the most exaggerated – that it is easy to forget that the great films all go in the opposite direction. They are, almost without exception, triumphs of minimalism. They rely on subtlety, understatement, indirection, and simplification. In Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch sets long sections […]
Director Paul Rachman retraces the history of punk rock. Paul Rachman’s American Hardcore is a salute to the U.S. underground punk scene that exploded in 1980. Inspired by Steven Blush’s 2001 book American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Feral House), Rachman’s blunt documentary was culled from over 120 hours of interview footage, as well as a stack of archival concert videos compiled from closets, shoeboxes and fan memorabilia stashes. The film also documents a phenomenon that Rachman and Blush observed firsthand, before the scene fizzled in the mid-’80s. “The scene burned out before anybody came to capitalize on it, so it’s […]
The director of Head-On investigates the rich musical culture of his homeland. DIRECTOR FATIH AKIN. The soundtrack and score of the critically acclaimed, adrenaline fueled doomed romance Head-On was a fusion of punk, European electronica, hip-hop, British new wave and traditional Turkish laments, so it’s no great surprise that the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s new movie is a documentary about the vibrant and diverse music community in Istanbul. It’s the city where Head-On music composer Alexander Hacke, better known as a member of the avant-garde band Einstuezende Neubauten, recorded a few songs for Head-On — and became fascinated by the […]