The Punk Singer(2013)
dir. Sini Anderson
Kathleen Hanna, riot grrrl, and what it cost.
Where to watch: Criterion Channel (title page found); Kanopy via library listings; verify current US availabilityLetterboxd ↗
The story of Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who helped start riot grrrl, and then went quiet at the height of her influence. Anderson uses interviews, performance footage and Hanna's own account of why she stopped and what came after. It is both a history of a movement and a portrait of the person who paid for it.
Why it’s here
The film shows how a movement is built by people with a photocopier and a loud voice. What's punk is the insistence that girls get to take up space and say the unsayable. What's pedagogical is the zine culture, the way the music was a tool for organizing and the way an art scene can be a school. Pairs with Notes from Underground, Please Kill Me and Bad Feminist. Note: it is an admiring portrait, and riot grrrl's whiteness and its limits are only touched on.
Where This Film Lives
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
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Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
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Why people make zines, and what it changes.
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Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
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The Black co-ops history forgot to teach.
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Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
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100 real climate solutions, ranked by impact.
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Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Improvisation as a way of making art and a life.
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Night Watch
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A cop falls back into a barricade uprising.
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Stella by Starlight
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A girl, her notebook, and a burning cross.
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Teacher
Sylvia Ashton-Warner
A teacher lets Māori kids choose their own words.
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