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piratecinemaberlin
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It's been a long time since we've last screened a cam (*), but in the case of
"Straight Outta Compton", it seems like the right thing to do. It's not a bad
film per se, but of course what you're going to witness is no longer the
strength of street knowledge, but the power of Hollywood -- and the willingness
of the surviving protagonists -- to turn one of the most explosive moments in
rap history into a rather slow-burning epic populated by a cast of thoroughly
likable characters whose rightful anger, cinematographically reconstructed and
contextualized as part of an unprecedented success story, doesn't produce much
more than appeasement. It's not that N.W.A's confrontational and divisive
approach is entirely lost in the process, and obviously it is "the right film
at the right time", but by attempting to make canonical a message that at the
time was quite radically contingent -- "Straight Outta Compton" (the album)
doesn't just foreshadow the 1992 L.A. riots, but also their complexity and
contradictions -- the whole operation loses quite a bit of its edge. Hindsight
flattens, and while in hindsight, "Straight Outta Compton" is undoubtedly one
of the greatest albums ever made (somewhat front-loaded maybe, just like the
movie), at the time, hardly anyone who wasn't a direct addressee took much of a
notice. America hated it, Europe ignored it, and Public Enemy stole the show.
They stole it because they were into global communications and properly
political propaganda, they stole it because their music was full of references
to black militancy that any white middle-class kid could look up on whatever we
used before Wikipedia, and they stole it because even white intellectuals were
susceptible to the warm and fuzzy feeling of Brechtian dialectics that their
music, however baroque it all sounded, managed to transport. N.W.A on the other
hand may have had nailed a sound that was aggressive yet funky, not exactly
minimal, but sufficiently reduced to serve as a blueprint for an entire
generation that would subsequently fill in the blanks -- and the movie at hand
owes a lot to the fact that this particular mix of punch and bounce has aged so
well, has become one of the most recognizable aural signatures of Hip-Hop as
rebellion -- but whatever Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E and MC Ren had to say about
cops and bitches, there really wasn't much appreciation for it at the time.
Unlike, say, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B. and Rakim, the Jungle Brothers or
EPMD, who by 1988 were beginning to earn recognition beyond their immediate
audiences, up to the point where established music critics were warming up to
the idea that this whole rap thing might actually evolve into a fully
legitimate genre and art form, N.W.A didn't have much of a lobby. In retrospect
one might think that the heirs and heiressess of twenty years of radical
counter-culture should have been more susceptible to a message like "Fuck tha
Police", but no punk would make it past the first few "punk-ass niggaz", no
feminist past the first few "suck this, bitchez". "Straight Outta Compton" just
didn't resonate with white audiences -- other than, eventually, the FBI. Only a
million people bought the album, but as legend has it, they all started a riot.
And that riot, just like most of the other key moments of the movie (judging by
any of the teasers or trailers) looks a bit too Hollywood, too cinemascope, too
4k -- and it all sounds a bit too dolby-surround, especially N.W.A live on
stage -- for the entire chain of events not to appear strangely predetermined,
almost inevitable, and at the same time conspicuously fabricated, rigged, late
80s that feel as if they could be late 60s, or as if it didn't matter if they
were or if they did, just as if the story of N.W.A was a universal parable
rather than something that actually happened at a specific time and place. The
visual and acoustic texture of the film, both its grit and its gloss, never
stops to remind us that its mission is to write history, that it's winners who
write it, and that they often prefer a bold pen. Of course (a) that's fully
intentional, (b) who would deny that Dr. Dre, whose most recent victory lap has
taken him Straight Into Cupertino, is a winner, and (c) there would have been
worse candidates. Still, this is why screening a cam seems appropriate, even if
somewhat nostalgic (nostalgia not for South Central L.A. but for the medium of
the cam, whose golden era some of us may still remember). The distance to the
original is relatively small -- it's quite watchable, and where intended, the
dialogue is audible -- but there is just enough blur and burn in the image to
make the action appear a little less authentic and thus a little less fake, and
the audio, even if just minimally distorted, adds realism and at the same time
produces a subtle Verfremdungseffekt that the film is otherwise lacking. Our
hope is that in this particular form, the whole thing looks and sounds a tiny
bit less timeless. Since originally, the assumption that one can create
situations, circumstances, encodings or filters, sometimes even inadvertedly,
through which false timelessness and fake cinematic truth fades and lets
conditions of production, distribution or consumption shine through, sometimes
even conditionality as such, and not as a vague impression, abstract idea or
mere afterthought, but as concrete and finite regions of pixels times pixels
times time on a wall that you can actually point your finger at, was one of the
reasons why, ages ago, we thought it was a good idea to run this cinema (**).
(*) www.piratecinema.org/screenings/20070617
(**) www.piratecinema.org/screenings/20050612
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straight outta compton
v:4 a:6
in cinemas august 27
sunday
august 23
9 pm
prⅳate cinema
kreuzberg
rsvp
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1398426
http://youtu.be/YVKjM2YYKXA
http://piratecinema.org/images/straight_outta_compton.jpg
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prⅳate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org
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