Rock, Rage & Self Defense was reviewed in German! Read the English translation below:
Seattle, early nineties. A vital local music scene that nourishes itself from the original Punk-Underground, the political Hardcore and Alternative-Rock, comes lightening-like into the focus of the global music business with Nirvana’s surprising success. A few disillusioned, even depressive boys conquer MTV first, then the front pages of the big music magazines and finally the whole world.
That, at least, is the current narrative. That there was neither a dominant homogenous scene nor a homogenous sound in Seattle, that for every successfully launched project of the majors a dozen indie bands remained unnoticed, has in the meantime made the rounds. But the women of the Seattle scene have up to now remained strikingly excluded even from these subsequent clarifications. And yet there were a lot of them – and they have a damned lot to tell as can be seen on the basis of the oral history documentary “Rock, Rage and Self-Defense” which tells about the founding of the Initiative “Home Alive” arising from the punk spirit of “Do it yourself.” This was a grassroots democratic initiative that – years before the triumphant march of the World Wide Web, which democratized access to knowledge – not only spread information about rape culture and countered the normative rhetoric that made women responsible when they were raped but also and most importantly transmitted in affordable courses the practical knowledge to women necessary for defending themselves against attackers in case of an emergency. The sad impetus for this self-help networking was the rape and murder of Mia Zapata, front woman of the punk band The Gits in 1993.
For their oral history, the directors Leah Michaels and Rozz Therrrien allow the numerous founders and protagonists of the organization, looked after since the beginning by many other women, to tell their story.
Unlike the usual feel-good rockumentaries about underdogs coming together, the story here isn’t just about the emblematic condensation of a doubtlessly impressive success; it’s also about concrete experiences. That is the reason that alongside the numerous scenes of exhaustion and gnawing discussions that every initiative seeking consensus decisions suffers, the shock waves that the Zapata case sent through the scene are at the center of the film: Was it possible that previous meeting spaces for the scene were not safe spaces? Did Zapata know her rapist and murderer? Was he himself perhaps a part of the scene?Unlike Kathleen Hanna’s much more well-known Riot Grrrl movement, also rising from the punk scene, Home Alive remained for a long time a primarily regional phenomenon. An unsung piece of feminist history that has been saved somewhat from oblivion by this film. As a result of the resources available to them ,the film looks somewhat raw and a little like “learning by doing” but this is quite appropriate to the content: the self-empowerment of the marginalized. Michaels and Therrien don’t have a professional film background; they ran across the topic of Home Alive during a university seminar on indie rock and underground music scenes.
And so the story of Home Alive and that of the film come together well: networking, solidarity, and a commonly born initiative can make things better. It is therefore also a component of the success story of “Rock, Rage and Self Defense” that this one-time seminar project has gone on an international film tour – independent of the approval of established film distributors and festivals and on the basis of an international network of activists.
This film is therefore valuable not only because it records the historical experiences of the Home Alive founders, but also because of its message for contemporary feminist movements, long fragmented by single subcultures: Get out of your isolation – together we are strong!
