“Rock filmmakers don’t exist”, said F.J. Ossang as he left the projection of Silencio, his new, powerful short film presented at the latest Festival Paris Ciné (read the interview with F.J Ossang). At a time when Julien Temple’s two feature films are being released – Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a biographical homage magnificently documented, but unfortunately, with no surprises, and Glastonbury, about the legendary festival (read the interview with Julien Temple)–, F.J. Ossang brings into question the genre “rock cinema”, if indeed such a concept even exists.

“Of course, my whole cinema is fueled by everything I love, and above all, rock music,” he says, “but that doesn’t make me a rock filmmaker, a label which for me is meaningless. If push came to shove, you might say Eisenstein, for his editing, is the closest any filmmaker has come to rock music. There are some filmmakers who have tried to make movies about rock music, or about the lives of rock musicians, but generally it has little to do with rock as a process.” What defines rock music and how is it embodied in cinema?

When media first recognized rock ’n’ roll as a phenomenon, Hollywood seized hold of the movement and the immense interest it aroused in a youth whose purchasing power had constantly increased since the end of World War II (read the review of the Rock’n'Roll exhibition in the Fondation Cartier). The studios created projects from scratch that allowed them to capitalize on the emerging celebrity of new idols and at the same time helped the artists launch their careers once and for all. From Little Richard or Bill Haley to Elvis Presley, going before the camera became a mandatory step. These films, often put together with a certain degree of cynicism, aimed in reality at exploiting the artist’s image and delivering a much more controlled vision of it. Rock ’n’ roll in these films is reduced to the original soundtrack and a Happy Days imagery. Catchy titles like Don’t Knock the Rock, Rock Pretty Baby, Let’s Rock or Shake, Rattle and Rock and stars on the movie posters were enough to ensure the films’ success and give birth to the teenage movie genre. But for the “spirit of rock”, we need look elsewhere. It is much more present in films that are not about music, but explore youth itself: Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, and László Benedek’s The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, exposed the world to the malaise of teenagers who were in direct conflict with the values of their elders. And although these two movies were made with anything but a “rock ’n’ roll” budget, and even though neither film contains a single rock song, they’re much closer to rock music in their intention. Future links between rock ’n’ roll and cinema were to spring from this very dichotomy: exploitative products banking on imagery for more or less honorable purposes, versus cinematic works that rely more heavily on a counter-cultural manifesto.

In the early 60s, with the end of the studio system and the emergence of new, independent means of production and distribution – the “new Hollywood” – a cinema was born that could really be called “rock ’n’ roll”. From Arthur Penn’s Bonny and Clyde to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, refrains of anti-establishment rebellion were sung, bringing into doubt a suffocating social model, and completely exposing the diktats issued by deciders who were disconnected from young adults trying to redefine themselves. For that is where the spirit of rock ’n’ roll is best expressed: in the most complete independence, and in defiance against all forms of authority.

Upon closer inspection, it is effectively not in musical films that we find what is essentially “rock”. Although Alan Parker’s The Wall, conceived with Pink Floyd, and, on another level, Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, showing the Rolling Stones in a recording session, may manage to capture the spirit that animates musicians, they have nothing of the definitive quality of universality that defines rock ’n’ roll. What is ultimately the essence of rock ’n’ roll is found more in the films of John Waters or Russ Meyer (in his early period, before his pure frenzy of mammary fetishism), such as Faster Pussycat Kill Kill or Super Vixens, in the debauchery of sex and violence, in a challenge to dominant morality and established order, and in a certain art of provocation. For in the end, rock ’n’ roll is not so much a question of music as it is a state of mind. Ultimately, there’s infinitely more rock ’n’ roll in any one film by John Carpenter than in the entire filmography of Elvis Presley, and in their own way, John Huston or Luis Bunuel are undoubtedly much more rock ’n’ roll than all the A Hard Day’s Nights and Almost Famouses in the world.

From the experimental opus of Kenneth Anger to the recent, and nastily in-your-face, films by Rob Zombie (lead singer of White Zombie and, in 2005, director of Devil’s Rejects, which brilliantly brought back to life the “bad-ass” attitude of the 70s), the “spirit of rock” can never be expressed in cinema in more than an indirect way. Political provocation, self-destructive hedonism, rebellion against the established order: what makes the “rock ’n’ roll attitude” can only be captured beyond the music itself and only expressed outside the shackles of films produced by a studio system that is inevitably destined to consolidate the largest number, while, in fact, the rocker is by definition alone against the world, an anti-hero, a magnificent loser with a fate that is necessarily as tragic as it is grandiose.

By Olivier Gonord with Jean Jacques Rue.