Director Tracy Flannigan spent over half a decade making Rise Above, her 2003, eighty-minute documentary on the iconic San Francisco band Tribe 8 – the first all-woman punk band that was totally queer. Flannigan packs a lot of information in this dense, fast-moving overview, and it’s clearly the work of a true fan. But she’s a fan who knows just what questions to ask as a surrogate for the uninitiated among her viewers, and she does it while also letting her subjects shine (onstage and off) in ways that justify the love of longstanding devotees. The band’s influence cannot be overstated. Even as it morphed through several lineup iterations and navigated internal fissures, they were singular role models/heroines/trailblazers forging a path on which alternative art and outlaw identity were fused.
There’s ample high-velocity concert footage illustrating not only the evolution of their sound but (in punk’s grand tradition of learning while on the job) their growing proficiency on their instruments. It also captures their dazzling stage magnetism. But Flannigan really shows her chops by getting the women to speak on the personal issues that drive and sometimes haunt them: child abuse, racial anxiety, their own takes on lived gender fuck, the need to stand in opposition to various status quos. To a woman, they speak with disarming candor (and more than a dollop of biting humor) so the film is never less than riveting. Concert excerpts in which hetero male fans are made to suck on dildos (and the band’s explanation of why they made that part of the act) nicely straddle the line between theory and simple fuck-you politics.
The film’s one real weakness is Flannigan’s choice to forego any music critic or scholarly talking heads. Normally, that’d be a good thing – just let the band speak for itself. But it would have actually served the band had some music expert or historian, or even (in very, very small doses) an academic, been brought in to speak on the social and political context in which the band was formed and worked, and to give some idea of their importance and influence, what (if anything) of their artistic DNA is floating through the here and now. That’s a small flaw, though, in a film as informative and entertaining as Rise Above.
