boredom is always counter-revolutionary

So you’ve seen Humphrey Jennings’ London Can Take It! (1940), right? Classic of the British documentary movement,  produced (jointly) by ‘the only real poet British cinema has yet produced’, and so on and so on. Well, anyway, I just found out about Punk Can Take It (1979), by Julian Temple with the UK Subs, which detournes Jennings’ film to fantastic effect. Punk detournement is pretty common: what is interesting here is the inescapable cycle of resistance-recuperation reflected in the choice of source material for the punk film. Even though by 1940 Jennings was producing this propaganda for the MoI and had returned to his natural conservatism, in the years previous he had been involved with both the English surrealist movement and Mass-Observation, both of which had strong anti-authoritarian (albeit communist rather than ‘77 punk nihilist) drives and both had shared with punk a rallying against a particular motif of the oppressive order of the old world: the monarchy.

Anway, Punk Can Take It: