When I found Chicago filmmaker David Thomas last Thursday, he was planted in front of a computer at the River West video editing house where for four days he’d been trying to cut 14 minutes from his first feature-length movie, MC5: A True Testimonial. He’d eliminated 10 minutes of footage so far, and was struggling mightily to find the last few disposable moments. “It’s pretty slam-bam all the way through,” he explained. “We’re at the point where we’ve had to take out parts of the story. We lost a whole character yesterday.”
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Thomas and Legler had no such qualms. “We didn’t do this to further our film career. We did it because it was the MC5,” says Thomas. Quoting Brother JC Crawford’s incendiary intro to the band’s signature recording of “Kick Out the Jams,” he adds, “It’s our purpose here on the planet.”
In April the pair finally screened a 135-minute director’s cut for friends, family, crew members, and the subjects. (I haven’t seen it; there’ve been no press screenings.) It hasn’t been picked up by a distributor yet, but it has been accepted by the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival, which takes place in September, and it is at the programmers’ request that it has been shortened. Thomas and Legler had already expected to have to edit it down for distribution, so they weren’t too upset. “It all comes down to art versus the restrictions of the marketplace,” says Legler. “We always said that we didn’t work on this film so that no one would see it.”
Another of CUFF’s music-related offerings, Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community, tackles a fascinating topic: the mid-90s emergence of punk rock in Seoul. Though the scene isn’t by any means cohesive or easy to pin down–the subjects argue over a definition of punk and disagree about what their activities really mean–over the course of the 39-minute video a sense of developing community does come through. Directors Timothy Tangherlini and Stephen Epstein make some odd aesthetic choices, though: an extended segment on the all-female band Supermarket lets the drummer yammer on about how much she enjoys doing laundry, and for a full minute we watch her clean a pair of socks. Sooyoung Park, the Korean-American musician who fronted the Chicago indie-rock band Seam, narrates. It’s showing Friday, August 23, at 6:45 PM and Monday, August 26, at 1:45 PM at Landmark’s Century Centre, on a program with the animated short Rude Roll (How to Dance Ska) and Useless, a documentary about Gerry Hannah, the former Subhumans bassist who went on to become an infamous Canadian terrorist.
