East Punk Memories dir. by Lucile Chaufour (review)

L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between opens memorably: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” Few representations of social and personal memory could more compellingly validate this idea than the documentary East Punk Memories. Members representing the harshest punk bands of the 1980s in Hungary (ETA, Aurora, CPG, QSS, Kretens, Modells, and Bandanas)—ten men and two women—were queried twenty years later (around 2004) to reflect on the olden days, their former friends, the subculture they had formed, and the social environment that spawned it. The second set of discussions addressed the seismic shifts the subjects had experienced in their lives in the wake of the momentous change they helped usher in, even though unconsciously, by decrying János Kádár’s regime in Hungary. The film is thus a documentary within a documentary, shot in its entirety by Loucile Chaufour, a filmmaker, composer, and rock musician. (She played in the band Trottel formed by Tamás Rupaszov, featured in the film, and enjoyed a long and successful career as an alternative musician.)

In 1984, Chaufour lacked official permission to shoot, and her Super 8 mm film remained, by and large, unknown to the public. Two decades later she used this valuable footage to probe her subjects’ memories and reflections. The film is thus a multivocal and layered commentary on the recent past, addressing an array of issues such as the nature of teenage rebellion, the politics of punk rock in relation to leftwing and rightwing ideologies, civic freedom and repression, state socialism and capitalism, national sovereignty and nationalism. Students of collective memory and nostalgia in particular will find this aspect of the film edifying.

Viewers are introduced to the characters as they respond to old, grainy recordings of shows and parties featuring their young selves thrashing away on their guitars, spewing irate and obscene invective about bureaucrats and party secretaries, and proclaiming everything and everyone dead or dying around them. We also see them strolling in the streets with their dyed mohawks—a strange outgrowth of the socialist cityscape with its iconic statues of Vladimir Lenin, monochrome housing projects, and lackluster boulevards. It is poignant to witness, in the later part of the film, how these fortyish, mostly ordinary looking, though in some cases heavily tattooed, folks react to the images and sounds of the past: with hearty laughter or bafflement, wonderment or pride. In some instances the complexity of emotions the recordings evoke renders them silent.

Make no mistake, being a punk, as this film makes clear, did not merely signify anger and frustration. It was fun to be shocking and making noise—musical and metaphorical. Several photographs portray giggling and boozing teens fooling around and posing for the camera’s eye. But beyond the “semiological guerrilla warfare” (Umberto Eco’s phrase cited by Dick Hebdige’s Subculture, the Meaning of Style), beyond the anger and the excess, the director also captures the musicians’ sober account of the constraints faced in producing shows and making records, as well as the repercussions they suffered at school and from the police for performing. Some interviewees shared, in disarmingly simple terms, how the entire system stifled individuality and critical thought, and how it emptied the spirit from people’s everyday lives. The enemy was the state, as Dezső Vojtkó explains, and its enemies tended to be on the right. Some references were made to the subcultures’ fringes, including some who became skinheads and flirted with Nazism.

This flirtation, however, was fueled by an obvious misunderstanding. Unlike the skinheads, the Sex Pistols’ and Dead Kennedys’ use of the swastika expressed no sympathy with fascism but merely served to shock. The target of racist rock in Hungary was (and still is) the Roma. But to viewers who dismissed all extreme punk bands as racist based on a few Roma-hating songs by one or two bands at most, the film is useful in clarifying that this brand of punk was more like a loose...