Punking Punk

Punk promised that anyone could get on a stage. It didn't always keep the promise. These two documentaries follow the people who held it to its word: the women who founded the first all-female bands in Düsseldorf, West Berlin, and Zurich, and the queer punks who built a scene of their own when the movement's macho turn pushed them out. Two films, one evening, and the same refusal to ask permission.

Einfach machen! She-Punks von 1977 bis heute
Reto Caduff, Germany/Switzerland 2024, 94 min, German with English subtitles

"Do it! Don't talk about it. Do it!" Martina Weith, lead singer and saxophonist of Germany's first all-female punk band Östro 430, summed up the movement's radical practice in a single demand. Decades later, the women who led pioneering bands like Mania D, Malaria!, and Kleenex are back on stage, decrying patriarchy, sexual repression, dogmatic feminism, and right-wing violence with the same electric fervor. Caduff's nervy documentary traces the story of the women of German-language punk — innovators and provocateurs who fought as hard against bourgeois society as against the subculture's own machismo. With interviews from Weith, Gudrun Gut, and Bettina Köster, it looks back on punk's contradictory gender dynamics and these women's triumphant fight to plant their own black flag within it.

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution
Yony Leyser, Germany/USA 2017, 83 min, in English

While some of punk's brashest arms-bearers were enjoying global superstardom in the 1980s, its queer members found themselves on the margins. Punk, with its own kind of homophobia, needed to be punked. From underground shows and actions during the AIDS crisis to anarcho-queer zines like Homocore and J.D.s, the offshoot movement known as Queercore nurtured a community for everyone too queer for mainstream punk and too punk for gay respectability. Built from hours of interviews with the movement's participants — including filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, zine publisher G.B. Jones, and musicians Kathleen Hanna and Kim Gordon — Leyser's film charts the rise of a wave of radicals in search of an artistic and sexual politics that was truly inclusive and always subversive.