The Punk Singer

Tris Arthur (Emerson College '23)

Filmmaking has always been an expensive art, and documentary filmmaking is no exception. Budgets for films centering popular musicians have ballooned into eight-figure numbers, creating a large commercial industry out of biographical music documentaries. So where does that leave the smaller players? For as long as music documentaries have been around, independent filmmakers have found a way to carve a space in that niche for what, from a major producer’s perspective, might as well amount to nothing. The question, then, is why make these smaller films? At the end of the day, independent music documentaries will make far less income than their multi-million-dollar counterparts, maybe even costing the filmmaker more money than they make back from it, so why go through the trouble of making a music documentary for non-commercial purposes? The answer can be many things—art, appreciation, recognition—but Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer (2013) takes a less common approach for music documentaries: social-impact filmmaking.

The Neda Nobari Foundation defines social-impact filmmaking as “independent documentary filmmaking that seeks to tell deep human stories that inspire a revolution of the heart.” While this idea of social-impact filmmaking might usually be applied to films with a more overtly-political or social subject (Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers (1968) comes to mind), I believe there is a case to be made that The Punk Singer serves as the biographical music documentary version of this type of filmmaking, which is reflective in the film’s subject matter, its subjective perspective, and its low-budget, no-frills aesthetics.

The Punk Singer is, at its core, a documentary about Kathleen Hanna: a feminist punk rock musician famous for Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and, importantly, the Riot Grrrl movement. Through Riot Grrrl and her music career, Hanna has spent a large part of her life fighting for women across all races, ages and sexualities against the violence committed against them, thus cementing herself as not just a musician but as a feminist symbol. She has used her music and artistic expression to forward her cause, so while The Punk Singer may serve as a musician’s biography, it is also concurrently an activist’s biography.

In telling Hanna’s story, The Punk Singer makes little effort to hide that at the end of the day, this film was made for very little money and is not a commercial venture. While the film has a somewhat disappointing tendency to stick to traditionally commercial modes of documentary filmmaking with abundant talking heads intermixed with plainly-presented archival materials, the execution of each of these tropes calls attention to the fact that this is an independent production making no great effort to pretend to be otherwise. For instance, see the following screenshot of recurring interviewee Lynnee Breedlove:

Ever Since I was a child I have always had a strong liking for punk music. I grew up listening to various punk and grunge artists from the late 80s and early 90s thanks to my older siblings. Once I became old enough to go to concerts I noticed extremely quickly that many punk spaces are an incredibly male dominated crowd. This confused me at the time because most of my friends who also shared an interest in punk music were female identifying. I soon realized that the majority of punk catered towards men, and because of this, it was generally not a safe place for women. While watching The Punk Singer I was immediately taken back to my early concert days when my consciousness of being perceived as a woman in these settings was at its peak. This film directly addresses the female experience within the punk scene, something of which I had never seen. The Punk Singer demonstrates how the punk scene can be a female inclusive and empowering space, by exemplifying the importance and value of women in punk. 

One of the biggest takeaways from The Punk Singer for me was the emphasis of the motto “All girls to the front.” More specifically, how Kathleen Hanna wanted to create an environment within punk that recognized and uplifted women. In the punk scene it was not generally safe to be a woman. In the article titled “REFORMULATING THE RIOT GRRRL MOVEMENT: SPACE AND SISTERHOOD IN KATHLEEN HANNA’S LYRICS” The author Alconada states, 

 “During the 1980s gender differences and sexism within Washington D.C. all-male punk community became more and more obvious: ‘A prescriptive hardcore sound evolved in DC which emphasized instru- mental virtuosity and speed which, unlike independent punk culture in Olympia, troubled the meanings and values of punk and DIY and produced more gendered experiences of the punk scene’. Thus, girls who enjoyed alternative punk music and attended punk concerts were commonly pushed to the sides as coat stands, got insulted, and asked to move out of the scene.” 

This documentary touches on how women were treated before female artists like Bikini Kill and the “riot grrrl” movement with personal stories from associates of Hanna and Hanna herself, stating how women were being disrespected, ignored, and abused. A specific example that stood out to me in the first half of The Punk Singer, where Hanna herself tells a story about an incident with her roomate, who was followed and almost killed by a man in her own apartment. In the documentary Kathleen Hanna speaks how this incident flipped a switch in her brain that caused her to focus on making sure her friends and other women were safe. A place where men did not control the room and had no power to induce harm. I thought this documentary did an excellent job on showcasing throughout the film the violence towards women in the punk scene. More specifically, the violence by men focused towards Kathleen Hanna herself on and off stage. Throughout the film she discussed vile comments that men were making in person or through mail, and actual attempted violence at shows towards the women present at the venue. Moments like those were important to exemplify the weight of Kathleen Hanna’s fight for female empowerment.

Much of her advocacy for women was contained in her lyrics themselves. By being an activist for women on stage, by demanding respect for all women, especially a right for women to have a place within punk. While discussing Bikini Kill’s lyrical content Alconada states, “That feeling of bonding and sisterhood that these girls created was in need of a space where to freely and safely express their feminine conditions. In the lyrics of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre we come across examples in which Hanna openly asks for feminist spaces within the underground sphere in which her bands were positioned.” This film did a great job at encapsulating Hanna’s fight in her lyrical content for female inclusion. One thing I found interesting is how they segwayed from Bikini Kill and shifted focus on Julie Ruin and Le Tigre. Part of me wishes The Punk Singer focused a little more on Le Tigre and Julie Ruin, the way they did for Bikini Kill, but it was a little rushed comparatively. 

The documentary showcased how Kathlen Hanna would tell all the women in the audience at her show to come to the front of the crowd, to push past the men. This displayed Kathleen Hanna's fight for sisterhood within punk. This documentary did a clear job of emphasizing the importance within Kathleen Hanna's belief that women need to be heard and respected with a display of a mix of talking heads and archival footage. This belief  translated to some of the specific choices during the production and post production for The Punk Singer. More specifically, the choice of who spoke for their talking heads segments. 

This documentary contained almost all talking heads from women in the industry, friends, and family of Kathleen Hanna. This choice I believe was deliberate and created a place where women are important. There was no sense of a need from validation of a high status male talking head. Kathleen Hanna stated herself in an interview with SXSW in 2013 she states,  "I want women to be the experts. I don’t want these male experts to come in to make it legitimate.”  When watching The Punk Singer this was the first thing to really stick out to me. One talking head I thought worked especially well was the choice to include Carrie Brownstein. She speaks on how Hanna was like during her shows and how empowering it was for her. Including her stuck out to me because Brownstein herself is a part of a band Sleater-Kinny, which originated from Kathleen Hanna's movement in the early 90s. This choice to not include male experts to make women's statements legitimate, is something that I had ever seen within a documentary, and refreshing to see. 

On the other hand one note of criticism I would say regarding this is that there are few moments where Hanna contradicts her beliefs. I think the moments with Adam Horowitz, the frontman of the Beastie Boys, who is also her husband, tend to lean towards a bias on Kathleen Hanna's part. She even states in the movie that she is aware of the irony that a feminist punk singer like herself married someone who made songs objectifying women. This is not brought up ever again in the film, but nonetheless I think it is important to address. 

 The Punk Singer, while sometimes lacking visual intrigue at times, had an informal and refreshing narrative within the world of music documentaries. Even though it was unoriginal with some of the visual choices and aesthetics of the film, the nuance of only having women as the experts within the context of the film is truly inspirational.

Anais Abrego (Emerson College '24)

I was first introduced to Kathleen Hanna when I was 15 or 16, frustrated by the inappropriate gaze that falls on teenage girls as sexual objects. I wanted nothing more than to still be perceived as a child in public settings and my outward appearance did nothing to deflect this difficult, confusing, often demoralizing, transition from childhood to womanhood. Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics offered a dynamic approach to the feelings I could not yet articulate about loss of innocence, sexual violence against women, and rejection of traditional femininity. 

These themes, specifically sexual violence against women, are something that Hanna has explored since beginning her career as an artist with spoken word poetry and zine writing. The Punk Singer opens with a recording of a spoken word performance by Hanna from 1991. Attention-grabbing and visceral in detail, Hanna exclaims: “I am your worst nightmare come to life… I am going to tell everyone what you did to me… it was the middle of the night in my house.” Disarming the audience, Director Sini Anderson’s choice to begin here reflects the essence of Kathleen Hanna’s intertwinement of social justice and experimental art. Following this scene, Hanna narrates her experience meeting the late Kathy Acker, an influential figure in feminist avant-garde literature, mentioning that Acker convinced her to leave spoken word behind and start a band. 

Acker’s work, particularly Blood and Guts in High School (published 1984), inspired Kathleen Hanna’s early zines including The Most Beautiful Girl is a Dead Girl (1992). Both texts utilize feminist avant-garde aesthetics that offer a complicated alternative picture of violence and consent. According to feminist theory scholar Anna Ioanes, This style is emphasized by an aesthetic that explores transgression and taboo via strategies such as nonlinear narrative, collage, and drawing in order to invite critical thinking about what feelings violence can provoke. 

On a surface level, I found The Punk Singer to be lacking in the aesthetic qualities that defined Hanna’s art and career. The film adheres to the ‘rules’ of a traditional biographical documentary film that works its way through the life of its subject in linear order decorated with archival photographs, footage, and talking head interviews. In an interview with Denver’s Westword magazine, director Sini Anderson mentions that she received access to Hanna’s personal archive of the Riot Grrrl collection at the Fales Library at NYU, yet this resource feels incredibly underutilized. Hanna’s zine work is briefly presented in photographs and a lone stopmotion animation sequence that only left me waiting for more mixed-media usage. On the subject of Riot Grrrl, Hanna mentions that her and her co-creators decided against branding and copyrighting the term in the film, mentioning that it “belonged to everybody” and was meant to inspire women across the country to create their own interpretations. However, the audience is given seconds to ingest the zines’ content in between brief zooms and close-ups. Glossing over an opportunity to showcase the content of a private collection locked behind NYU credentials felt incredibly antithetical to the populist approach Hanna discusses.Why not take a moment to linger and allow for a contemporary audience to digest and recontexualize the Riot Grrrl movement? 

The Punk Singer thrives when Sini Anderson finally allows for a lingering moment in the final section of the film which discusses Hanna’s difficult diagnosis with late stage lyme disease. A common practice in avant-garde cinema, extended, uninterrupted shots provide a platform to disrupt the conventional narrative structures that often marginalize female perspectives, allowing for a more immersive and holistic portrayal. Juxtaposing the fast-paced editing of the rest of the film, Hanna’s struggle with lyme disease is presented in extended takes, mirroring the duration of real life experience and breaking from a stylized biographical form. It is in these painful and uncomfortable moments sitting with Hanna on her couch or receiving an IV treatment that I truly felt a sense of how she has bore much of her personal life and energy into art and social justice. The Punk Singer makes sure that Hanna and Bikini Kill's many disagreements with mainstream music press at the height of their popularity are no secret, and I appreciate how Sini Anderson resisted in fragmenting female experience and allowed Kathleen Hanna to reclaim her own story. 

The idea that the personal experience is important and necessary is a defining element of feminist avant-garde aesthetics which aim to recontexualize the every day. To experimental filmmakers such as Lynne Sachs, our personal lives are saturated with socio-political meaning that can be extracted to link private moments to major national or global events. In Sachs’ The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), Sachs links the experience of a mid 20th century woman seeking permission to use contraceptives to the modern fight for abortion access in the United States in order to critique the lack of progress towards protecting women’s health and safety. A combination home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes, and found footage, The House of Science embraces the personal in the hopes that you can see yourself in it.