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      The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.

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      The group put out five albums in the ’70s and counted David Bowie and Bonnie Raitt as fans. The filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart, dismayed its story hadn’t been told, took action.In spring 2015, the documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart was clicking around the Taylor Guitars website, looking for a new instrument for her 10-year-old daughter, when she came across a short profile of June Millington, the singer and lead guitarist for the pioneering 1970s all-female rock group Fanny.Hart, now 56 and living in Montreal, grew up in a hippie household in California “with piles of LPs all over the place”: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on. But she had never even heard of Fanny, despite the fact that it was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label.Fanny put out a total of five albums between 1970 and 1974, one of which was produced by Todd Rundgren. The band scored two Top 40 hits — the swinging, soulful “Charity Ball” and the doo-wop-flavored “Butter Boy” — and played in the United States and abroad with Slade, Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, the Kinks and Chicago. The group backed Barbra Streisand in the studio and performed on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “American Bandstand.”In 1999, Bowie hailed Fanny as one of the finest rock bands of its time in Rolling Stone. He also lamented that “nobody’s ever mentioned them.”Kathy Valentine, the bassist of the Go-Go’s, a later all-female band, wished more people had spread the word about Fanny. “If their visibility had been higher,” she said in an interview, “we would have seen a lot more women in the rock landscape.” Valentine didn’t hear about Fanny until 1982, she said, by which time the Go-Go’s were making their second album.When Hart, the filmmaker, first learned about Fanny online, she had a visceral reaction. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “It was just another example of amazing women that we don’t know about.” Hart reached out to former band members about the possibility of a documentary, but determined that at the time, the Fanny story didn’t have the “forward-momentum narrative” she was looking for.Then, in January 2017, Hart attended the Women’s March in Washington. She was watching Madonna speak on the Jumbotron when she spotted a woman with “flaming gray hair” onstage, filming the proceedings on her iPhone. It was June Millington. The sighting spurred Hart to call Millington, who had some news: Three members of Fanny — Millington, her younger sister, the bassist and singer Jean (Millington) Adamian, and the drummer and singer Brie Darling, a fellow Filipina-American — were about to make a new album on an indie label. The moment for a film had arrived.The resulting documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock,” opens in New York on Friday before hitting other major markets and, on Aug. 2, video on demand. (It will come to PBS in 2023.) The movie documents the making of that album, recorded under the name Fanny Walked the Earth and released in 2018, and features interviews with five members from the original group’s frequently shifting lineup. (The reclusive keyboardist Nickey Barclay, who has said she hated her time in the band, notably did not participate. She also declined to speak for this article.) Valentine, Bonnie Raitt and the Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott are among the talking heads.From left: Jean Millington, Nickey Barclay, Brie Darling, Alice de Buhr and June Millington practice in the basement of their band’s famed home, Fanny Hill.Linda WolfThe documentary lovingly recounts the history of Fanny, beginning with the sisters June and Jean Millington, who were born in the Philippines to a white American naval officer father and a Filipina socialite mother. In 1961, the Millington family moved overseas to Sacramento, Calif., where the sisters, as early adolescents, had a difficult time fitting in. Racism was a constant part of life. (In the film, Jean recalls the father of a boyfriend of hers telling his son, “I’ll buy you a Mustang if you stop seeing that half-breed girl.” The boyfriend opted for the car.)The sisters found solace in music, forming an all-girl band in high school called the Svelts, which played the radio hits of the day. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey, a Motown cover group that decamped to Los Angeles in 1969 to make it big. Wild Honey signed with Warner Bros. Records’s Reprise label later that year. Not long after, the band, looking for a new name with a female identity, chose Fanny, which in the United States is slang for bottom.“We thought it was a double entendre that would work,” said June Millington, 74. It wasn’t until the band members toured overseas that they discovered that in Britain, fanny is slang for female genitals.Early on, the band lived in Fanny Hill, a house in West Hollywood that Millington, in the film, calls “a sorority with electrical guitars.” Joe Cocker and the lead singer of the Band, Rick Danko, hung out there, and the group Little Feat would come over and jam; Raitt was a houseguest for a time. A libertine, clothing-optional spirit prevailed. “It was a wonderful, creative environment,” said Darling, who is 72 and lives in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t people just getting high” and having sex.The film highlights the fact that two of Fanny’s members — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians, something that the band never dared speak about publicly in those days. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’” recalled de Buhr, now 72 and residing in Tucson, Ariz. “And I’d say, ‘I’m taken.’ I hated not being able to say, ‘Well, I’m in love with a woman.’”Predictably, Fanny was subjected to a great deal of sexism, often being treated as a novelty act. “Most of society didn’t see girls with a guitar between their legs,” said Patti Quatro, 74, who replaced Millington as lead guitarist in 1974. (Quatro, of Austin, Texas, is an older sister of Suzi Quatro.)Millington said that the “condescension and sneering” that would greet Fanny at concert appearances was “so palpable it was almost physical.”Both Millington and her sister recalled, however, that Fanny would ultimately win over the crowd. “I felt like it took at least 10 minutes for everyone to realize there was not a boy band playing behind us,” said Jean (Millington) Adamian, 73, who lives in Davis, Calif. “They were waiting for us to fall down. And once we proved it was really us playing and singing, it was generally a big, uplifting experience.”Rock critics weren’t always swayed though. “We were battered by the reviews,” Millington said. “Every once in a while, they’d say, ‘Oh, they’re good.’” She cited a generally positive 1971 concert review in this newspaper headlined “Fanny, a Four-Girl Rock Group, Poses a Challenge to Male Ego.” “‘What will it do to the male ego?’ Well, who cares?” she said. “Why don’t you guys just deal with it and dig us?”“The fact is that Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” June Millington said.Linda WolfJUNE MILLINGTON EXITED Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of the Institute for the Musical Arts, a nonprofit recording and retreat facility she co-founded with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler, in Goshen, Mass. On the mantel were various Buddhist objects — Millington is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism — and a framed photo of Jimi Hendrix.“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Millington said, was the record company’s insistence that Fanny, whose members favored ’70s California chic, dress up in glammy, more revealing outfits onstage. (“My top was $45 worth of American coins, looped together, that just pinched my nipples,” de Buhr said.) Millington saw it as a sign that Reprise had lost faith in the band. “I took it as an insult,” she said.A new version of Fanny — featuring Adamian, Barclay, Darling and Quatro — signed with Casablanca Records and released a final album, “Rock and Roll Survivors,” in 1974. That record featured the single “Butter Boy,” which Adamian said was inspired by — but not about, as has been widely reported — her then-boyfriend, Bowie, and his gender-bending ways.“‘He was hard as a rock, but I was ready to roll, what a shock to find out I was in control of the situation,’” Adamian said, reciting the song’s opening lines. “I mean, those kinds of lyrics were very tongue-in-cheek and intended to be provocative.” “Butter Boy” became Fanny’s biggest hit, reaching No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1975. But by that time, the band had split up for reasons both artistic and personal.Fanny has technically never reunited. But in 2016, Millington, Adamian and Darling played together at a concert in Northampton, Mass., a collaboration that led to the self-titled album “Fanny Walked the Earth.” That LP includes appearances by de Buhr and Quatro, plus Valentine of the Go-Go’s and members of fellow all-female groups the Runaways and the Bangles.A tentative plan to tour behind the Fanny Walked the Earth album was scuttled when, two months before the record’s March 2018 release, Adamian suffered a stroke that affected the right side of her body. Today, she uses a wheelchair to get around. “I cannot play bass,” she said. “I keep looking at my two fingers, going, ‘If just one of you would move, that would be good.’ It’s absolutely frustrating.”Fanny Walked the Earth’s Jean Adamian, Darling and June Millington.Marita MadeloniMillington has experienced health issues of her own. Her snow-white hair was noticeably shorter than it had been during the Fanny Walked the Earth era, the result of chemotherapy she received last year to treat breast cancer that is now in remission.“I knew I was going to live because my work is not done,” she said. “So anything can happen.” She didn’t discount the idea of some version of Fanny recording or touring again. As for the latter scenario, she said it would take a lot of money to do so properly, given the medical situations she and her sister faced. (Adamian has sung live with Fanny Walked the Earth since her stroke; her son, Lee Madeloni, filled in on bass.)In the meantime, Millington said, she was looking forward to the release of “Fanny: The Right to Rock.” Hart, the director, expressed the wish that the documentary would lead to far wider appreciation for the band. “A not-so-secret dream that I have is if they would get that recognition to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Hart said.Millington isn’t waiting for a call from the Rock Hall. “Is it ever going to happen? I don’t know,” she said. “And at this point, I don’t care.” She said she was comfortable resting on her laurels. “I’m fine with it, because I never imagined anyone would mention Fanny ever again,” she said. “For 30, 40 years, we couldn’t get arrested.”The internet, she said, is exposing new audiences to the band. “Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” Millington continued. “It is igniting people all over the world of different ages and different sexes. It’s like the Olympic torch, and that is really something to be proud of.” More

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      ‘Pistol’ Mini-Series Captures the Anarchy in the Sex Pistols

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      ‘Pistol,’ a new mini-series directed by Danny Boyle, is based on a memoir by the punk band’s bassist and founder, Steve Jones.LONDON — “Are we doing any spitting?” asked a man in the crowd at the 100 Club, a small, red-walled underground space, redolent of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and a thousand lost nights, just off London’s Oxford Street.Yes, there would be spitting. The club was the setting for an early Sex Pistols gig, which last June was being recreated for “Pistol,” a six-part series about the British band, directed by Danny Boyle and streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in other territories, starting May 31.The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code” of the punk revolution, said Boyle, who seemed to be everywhere on set, talking to the extras about crowd behavior, checking cameras and peering intently at monitors as the actors performed the song “Bodies” and the audience went wild.“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” Boyle said in a recent interview. That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to do.”Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, with virtuosic panache, said Boyle’s approach was unlike anything he had previously experienced on a set. “You felt, this could go wrong, but you could trust in Danny and dive in and experiment — very Sex Pistols!”Before filming began, the actors playing the members of the Sex Pistols spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Miya Mizuno/FXThe result is a charged, visceral, Cubist portrait of the flamboyant rise and explosive fall of the Sex Pistols, whose brief existence from 1975 to 1978 made punk rock a worldwide phenomenon and whose anarchic songs (“God Save the Queen,” “Pretty Vacant”) became anthems for the disaffected.The series, written by Craig Pearce, is based on the memoir “Tales of a Lonely Boy” by Steve Jones, the band’s guitarist. But Boyle said that although Jones’s story was “a wonderful way in,” he and Pearce had tried to paint a composite picture of the entire group, and the ’70s world from which it emerged. (The band originally comprised Jones, the singer John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten, the drummer Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock on bass, replaced in 1977 by Sid Vicious.)The first episode opens with a montage of archival footage: The Queen waving politely to the crowd; a scene from the slapstick “Carry On” movies; David Bowie performing; striking workers and garbage piled in the streets. When we meet Steve (Toby Wallace), he is busy stealing sound equipment from a Bowie gig. (The singer’s lipstick is still on the microphone.)Steve and his bandmates are angry, bored, and “trying to scrape enough together for another pint,” he tells them as they discuss what their group should wear. “So, no suits?” asks the hapless Wally, who soon gets booted from the band.“It’s hard to overestimate how class-ridden and moribund British society was for these guys,” said Pearce, who met Jones, Cook and other figures close to the band before writing most of the script in his native Australia during the first months of the pandemic.“The promise of the Swinging Sixties didn’t deliver; rock ’n’ roll freedom didn’t happen for most kids,” Pearce said. “There was a feeling that if you were born into a certain class, you couldn’t escape. You had to accept what had been handed to you.”Then, he said, came “this group of kids who said, you are sleepwalking through life.”“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” said Danny Boyle, who directed “Pistol.”Miya Mizuno/FXBoyle, he added, was always his “dream director” for the series. “We couldn’t believe it when he immediately said he wanted to do it.”It turned out that Boyle couldn’t quite believe it either. “I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.” But after reading Pearce’s script, Boyle immediately said yes.“Which was ridiculous,” he said with a laugh, “since I didn’t even know if we would have the music, the most important thing.”Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and the series itself, but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.Boyle said that while he did extensive reading and research, talking to everyone he could find who had been involved with the band, he ultimately trusted his intuition in formulating an approach to the series.“I grew up in a similar working-class environment to Steve and these guys,” he said. “We are exactly the same age and I am a music obsessive. I had to explain to the actors what the 1970s were like; they just don’t recognize how little stimulation there was, how you waited all week for the lifeline of the New Musical Express to appear on a Thursday!”Before filming began, the actors playing the band members spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Sometimes Boyle would talk to them about the ’70s and show them footage. Then, led by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from the British electronic music group Underworld, they would spend hours playing together.Boyle said he had mostly avoided casting trained musicians. “I didn’t want anyone locked into an expertise,” he said, adding that Jacob Slater, who plays Cook, was an excellent guitarist, but had to learn drumming.Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), left, and Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) are two of the memorable female characters in the series. Miya Mizuno/FXHe also decided not to do any postproduction work on the music. “Like the Pistols, we just had to get up and, however imperfect we were, go for it,” said Sydney Chandler, who plays the American singer Chrissie Hynde. Chandler’s character is one of several memorable women in the series, alongside the designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton) and the punk icon Jordan (Maisie Williams).When it came to the band members, “we didn’t want to be tributes or caricatures,” said Anson Boon, who plays Lydon and, like his character, had never sung before. “The Pistols produced a raw, angry wall of sound and we wanted to capture that essence without trying to do an impression.”Playing a character who is also a real person was intimidating but fascinating, said Wallace, who spent time with Jones before filming began. “We talked a lot about his family, then he gave me the first guitar lesson I really had.”The series shows Steve’s unhappy childhood, which Wallace saw as central to Jones’s “anger and frustration,” he said, and led him to create “a band that represents the unrepresented.Working on the series, Boyle said, had made him aware of the Pistols’ importance beyond music. “They were a bunch of working class guys who broke the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he said. “It was especially resonant in the U.K., where the way you were expected to behave was so entrenched.”The Pistols, he added, gave their fans permission to do whatever they wanted, to waste their time however they wanted, to shape their own lives in a singular way.“They gave a sense of purpose to purposelessness,” he said. 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      Two Members of the Mighty Diamonds, Acclaimed Reggae Trio, Are Dead

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      Tabby Diamond, 66, was shot and killed Tuesday in Kingston, Jamaica. Bunny Diamond, 70, died three days later after a long illness.Two members of the Mighty Diamonds, a Jamaican trio that helped lead the wave of roots reggae arising from the streets of Kingston to international acclaim in the 1970s, have died within days of each other.Tabby Diamond, whose birth name was Donald Shaw, was shot and killed outside his home in Kingston on Tuesday. He was 66.Bunny Diamond, born Fitzroy Simpson, died on Friday at a hospital in the same city. He was 70.Marc-Antoine Chetata, the group’s longtime music publisher, confirmed the deaths. He said that the cause of Bunny Diamond’s death had not been determined but that he had been in declining health since having a stroke in 2015 and suffered from diabetes.The pair, who had first met in school, formed the Mighty Diamonds in 1969 with another former classmate, Lloyd Ferguson, who performed as Judge Diamond. With international hits like “Right Time” and “Pass the Kouchie,” and with more than a half-century of relentless recording and performing, they were by many estimates the longest-running reggae band in Jamaican history.Their deaths came as the group was preparing to record its 47th album and begin a tour.Tabby Diamond was shot late Tuesday night along with four other people, one of whom, Owen Beckford, was also killed. The shooting was first reported by the Jamaica newspaper The Gleaner.In a statement to The Gleaner, the Kingston police said that the shooting was most likely retaliation by a local gang against Mr. Shaw’s son JahMarley, whom the police later took into custody.The Mighty Diamonds were part of a wave of roots reggae acts that swept over Jamaica, North America and Europe in the 1970s, along with Bob Marley and the Wailers, Jimmy Cliff, Black Uhuru and others.The trio blended the classic one-drop beats of reggae with the tight harmonies of Motown; Tabby Diamond often cited the Temptations as one of his band’s inspirations, along with 1960s Jamaican artists like John Holt and Ken Boothe. Unlike several other top reggae acts of that era, the Mighty Diamonds typically eschewed overtly political themes in their lyrics, preferring a more general, spiritual message.From left, Bunny Diamond, Tabby Diamond and Judge Diamond in 1988. “Things change,” Tabby Diamond once said, “but we always write about what’s going on.”Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images“Things change, but we always write about what’s going on,” Tabby Diamond told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2008. “We have some sweet romantic songs, but we’re very aware of things and the dangers and people not getting enough to eat. We need to focus on people loving each other.”Judge Diamond was the group’s primary lyricist, but it was the silky-voiced Tabby Diamond who gave the trio its subtle power, at once relaxed and vibrant, typically backed by a seven-piece band.“The Mighty Diamonds’ smooth harmonies and solid, workmanlike performance evoked a Jamaican version of the O’Jays,” Wayne Robins wrote in a concert review in Newsday in 1986.The band had several hits in Jamaica in the early 1970s, including “Girl You Are Too Young” and “Country Living,” before their first international success, “Right Time,” in 1975. They signed a deal soon afterward with Virgin Records. The next year it released an album, also called “Right Time,” which included that song and several of their earlier hits.They traveled to New Orleans to record their next album, “Ice on Fire,” produced by the celebrated R&B songwriter, pianist and singer Allen Toussaint and released in 1977. An attempt to open the band to more American fans by stripping out much of their reggae sound, the album fell flat, derided by Jamaican and American critics alike as bland and uninspired.“The Diamonds seem here more like a rather average North American close harmony soul group than the reggae beauties they were on the first LP,” Rolling Stone wrote.Chastened, they returned to Jamaica and Channel One, the famous Kingston studio where they had made some of their first records. A string of critical and commercial successes followed, including the albums “Stand Up to Your Judgment,” “Deeper Roots” and “Changes.”One of the group’s most recognizable songs, 1981’s “Pass the Kouchie” — the title was a reference to marijuana — was recorded a year later by the British reggae band Musical Youth as “Pass the Dutchie,” a sanitized version (a “dutchie” is a cooking pot) that became an even bigger hit, rising high on both the U.S. and British charts.Though they were a mainstay on the Jamaican music scene and had international success in the mid-1970s, the Mighty Diamonds never achieved the same level of global stardom as did some of the other reggae acts of their generation, like Mr. Cliff or Mr. Marley — the result, Tabby Diamond often said, of a string of bad managers early in their career.But the trio, all practicing Rastafarians, took it in stride, and they never seemed to mind missing out on the trappings of fame.“They lived the simplicity of the Rastafarians,” Mr. Chetata said in a phone interview.Donald Orlando Shaw was born on Oct. 7, 1955, in Kingston. His father, Ronald Shaw, was a furniture maker, and his mother, Gloria Shaw, worked in a hospital.He is survived by his wife, Evandey Henry; his daughters, Samantha Shaw, Josheina Shaw, Ishika Shaw, Dominique Martin, Naomi Campbell and Sapphire Campbell; his sons, Javion Shaw, JahMarley Shaw and Brad Campbell; and five grandchildren.Fitzroy Ogilvie Matthews Simpson was born on May 10, 1951, in Kingston. His father, Burnett Simpson, moved to England when Fitzroy was young. His mother, Monica Matthews, owned a shop.His wife, Sylvia Simpson, died in 2017. He is survived by his sister, Lorna Howell; his brother, Lloyd Howell; his daughters, Ronece Simpson and Rosemarie Simpson; his sons, Allan Simpson and Omar Simpson; and six grandchildren. Although the members of the Mighty Diamonds all knew one another in school, it was only later, as young men working in Kingston, that they came together as a group. They originally called themselves Limelight, but they changed the name, and adopted their stage names, after Tabby’s mother started calling them the Diamonds.“Bunny, he lived by my house,” Tabby Diamond said in the 2008 interview. “And we thought maybe we can do something together, so we starting singing together. Then, one night we were passing and Bunny was singing and Judge heard him and said, ‘I want to play the guitar to that.’ So we played a few songs together one night and we said, ‘Yes, things can work, things can work out.’”After 40 years of recording and touring, the Mighty Diamonds slowed down in the early 2010s, but they continued to record. They received the Order of Distinction from the Jamaican government, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, in 2021.“Our music deals with one love, music wise and spiritual wise,” Tabby Diamond said in 2008. “We’re really still dealing with the same things from 20, 30, 40 years ago. But the music speaks for itself.”“We’re sending a good message to the people. That’s what we’re here for.” More

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      ‘Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over’ Review: A Punk Provocateur Endures

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      Beth B’s documentary tells the story of an iconic underground New York City misfit and her durable career.The musician, writer and spoken-word artist Lydia Lunch is an immediately provocative figure. The name alone, right? Escaping a horrifically abusive home in Rochester, N.Y., at 16, she took one look at the burgeoning 1970s punk rock scene on Manhattan’s Bowery and was determined to both join and upend it.“I had a suitcase and $200,” she recalls in “Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over,” a vigorous documentary directed by Beth B, whose own work as an underground filmmaker began in the same milieu as Lunch’s early efforts. Lunch’s first band was called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and one of their songs began with Lunch caterwauling, “The leaves are always dead.”Lunch, now 62 — who, when reflecting on her generation, says, “The ’60s failed us” — had other interests, musical and extra-musical. The abundance of her ideas, and her resourcefulness in executing them, enabled a career that’s been a lot more durable than those of many other iconoclasts of her time. Her musings on the condition of womanhood and the failings of conventional feminism are emphatic, to be sure. She asks how women “devolved from Medusa to Madonna” and offers an unusual perspective on the #MeToo movement that finds its rationale in an examination of cycles of abuse.Lunch’s entire aesthetic is centered around trauma: how abusers dispense it, how it is — and how she thinks it ought to be — received, and turned back on the world. This yields any number of anecdotes, including a tale from the musician Jim Sclavunos about how Lunch took his virginity before admitting him into one of her bands.The footage of her on the road with her current band, Retrovirus, shows her mastery of live performance and also highlights her very urban sense of sarcasm; sometimes she suggests no-wave’s answer to Fran Lebowitz.Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never OverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Wojnarowicz’ Review: A Revolutionary Provocateur

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      A documentary on the artist David Wojnarowicz shows the ways that the rebel was a prophet, and honors him appropriately.The artist David Wojnarowicz escaped one American hellscape to find himself smack-dab in the middle of another. In a 1985 short film he made with Richard Kern, “You Killed Me First,” Wojnarowicz, then in his early 30s, portrays a version of his own alcoholic, abusive father. The grindhouse-style underground movie depicts a real event — that father feeding his children’s pet rabbit to them for dinner.Directed by Chris McKim, this exemplary documentary on the artist (which is also a mini-chronicle of the East Village art scene of 1970s and ’80s New York) takes advantage of Wojnarowicz’s penchant for self-documentation, drawing on the cassette journals he began keeping even before he was a fully formed creator. The documents Wojnarowicz maintained in this period, during which his art became inextricable from his activism, guide the viewer into the second American hellscape Wojnarowicz experienced: the AIDS epidemic.Wojnarowicz’s insistence that the Reagan administration was practically gleeful in ignoring the disease while simultaneously stigmatizing its victims provoked a number of controversies, over arts funding and more. The work he produced, often in collaboration with or under the influence of the photographer Peter Hujar, his mentor, is still bracing and fiercely clear-eyed on political and moral issues that persist to this day. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, at age 37.The movie eschews contemporary talking-head interviews, instead showing speakers such as Fran Lebowitz, a close friend of Wojnarowicz and Hujar, as they were in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This is a strategic move, designed to make the movie’s final scene — in which several survivors of the artist and the era, now much older (a couple more frail than others), are shown attending a 2018 Whitney retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre — more powerful. It works. Shatteringly.WojnarowiczNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee. More

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      ‘Before the Dying of the Light’ Review: Moroccan Cinema’s Attempted Revolution

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      This Ali Essafi documentary presents an inspiring view of the roiling visual-arts scene in 1970s Morocco.In 1968, the first substantive film festival was hosted in Tangier, Morocco, an event not mentioned in this impressionistic documentary directed by Ali Essafi. For the most part, “Before the Dying of the Light” is an immersive creation — its on-screen texts mostly philosophical rather than explanatory.The date of that festival is significant, though, because it can be seen as an indicator of emergent Moroccan cinema, which in the 1970s aligned itself with other visual arts and briefly, under the oppressive regime of King Hassan II, tried to forge an authentic politically pertinent body of work.
      Essafi assembles and presents staggering images. He juxtaposes on-the-street archival interviews; multiple covers of literary magazines, both in Arabic and French (France claimed the country as a “protectorate” from the 1910s until the mid-1950s); newsreel clips; scenes from European films shot in Morocco; and Morocco-produced mainstream films (including 1973’s “A Thousand and One Hands,” directed by Souheil Ben-Barka and starring the American actress Mimsy Farmer).These are interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the 1974 film “About Some Meaningless Events.” Its filmmakers, led by the director Mostafa Derkaoui, are very self-interrogating, as was the custom in leftist aesthetics around the world at the time. Contemplating how to best use working-class people in the picture, a team member says, “We could write a script”; another immediately counters, “No.” Their obsessing about how to best capture the spirit of their times resulted in a picture that was suppressed soon after it was completed.Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.Before the Dying of the LightNot rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 8 minutes. Watch through MoMA’s Virtual Cinema. More