prⅳate cinema this sunday: straight outta compton

Fri Aug 21 14:48:41 UTC 2015

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 of 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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