Revisiting early punk cinema

This article outlines the main discussions around punk aesthetics and the culture of commodification, tracing the methods of punk's canonization back to the two early films that have been considered within the documentary genre and described as ‘transparent’ mainly due to their low-budget conditions: The Punk Rock Movie (Don Letts, 1978) and The Blank Generation (Amos Poe and Ivan Král, 1976). As this ‘punk cinema’ canon stems from a larger standardization of punk history, this article firstly presents the criticisms around the dominant narratives in the discourse around punk and the role of subjectivity in their writing. Drawing from deconstructive perspectives that give room to think about the relationship between punk and representation beyond the canon, I look at the ignored aspects of early punk cinema that involve a reliance on the cinematic referential codes of the heteronormative gaze, echoing the media sensationalism of the time. The Punk Rock Movie’s overlooked cinematic engagement with the media representations of punk and The Blank Generation’s approximation to cinema verité are both analysed in relation to how they textually engage with the ‘immediacy’ of the environment. In this analysis, the abundance of concert and archive footage comes across as an overriding effect in the reception of the two films. Expanding on Stacy Thompson’s adoption of Roland Barthes’s textual analysis in theorizing punk cinema, this article reconnects with what is actually ‘self-reflexive’ about these films as well as aiming to uncover how their overshadowing sense of transparency is constructed.

Novölittérature… à la brisure des années 1970

Comment « l’aventure punk » française a-t-elle été écrite ? Quel en fut le récit « littéraire » ? Par quels mots s’est-elle dite ? Jean-François Bizot, Patrice Eudeline, Kriss Vilà et Yves Adrien ont relaté avec éclat les avatars de ces « années blanches », 1976-1980. Entre témoignage, manifeste, roman-photos et fiction fantastique, leurs récits rendent compte de la brisure punk : débâcle de l’utopisme des années 1960, présent effondré, horizon sans lendemain. Les protagonistes de leurs récits traversent le vaste champ des désillusions des années 1970 et 1980. Inaptes ou indifférents au recyclage néolibéral qui s’amorce, ils « survivent » comme ils peuvent, confrontés à deux écueils : leur marginalisation inutile, la récupération marchande du néant. Sursaut brutal, déchéance morbide. « Sur la route de la déperdition et de la rédemption » (Bizot), une écriture s’invente. Entre dérision et tragique, elle exhibe les impasses de ces années-là. Écriture d’une blank generation relatant les « ultimes convulsions » de révoltes moribondes ; écriture extrême butant sur les impasses du moment. Nous relirons ces récits qui se construisent sur les vides ou les failles de ce qu’on appelle la modernité libérale-libertaire. Récits certes isolés, mais qui, témoignant d’un impossible retour « à la normale », se tiennent de manière exemplaire sur la limite désolée de cette époque – le long après-68, époque qui ne cesse de hanter notre présent.

Richard Hell, Genesis: Grasp, and the Making of the Blank Generation

From his early days in the Neon Boys through the Voidoid’s Blank Generation, Hell seeded references to Nerval, Rimbaud, Artaud, and other writers into his lyrics. While the influence of French literature on Hell’s musical output is fairly well documented, however, what is not investigated sufficiently is how, like a number of the musicians considered here, Hell’s love for French romantic, symbolist and surrealist literature coincided with an increasing attraction to the chirpy poetics of sociability then dominant in New York’s literary avant-gardes. Beginning with an in-depth reading of Hell’s editorship of a Lower East Side-based literary magazine Genesis : Grasp, this chapter moves on to explore how the St. Mark’s poets’ critical engagement with seriousness as a mode informed Hell’s literary and musical tastes. Hell would never read poetry or listen, sing and play music in such a way as to presuppose solemnity, intensity and passion were prima facie good things.

Hot Stamping Simulation with PAM-STAMP of the B-Pillar of a Well-Known SUV

Hot stamping is today the most efficient method to lighten automotive parts by keeping or even increasing vehicle security. The B-pillar of this report is from a well-known SUV’s style 2013 from a big JV OEM in Shanghai. 3 steps job were completed: die designing, blank generation and optimization, hot stamping simulation. Customer’s feedback showed a good correlation between FE analysis and trial out results.

Mathematical Modeling and Optimal Blank Generation in Glass Manufacturing

This paper discusses the stock size selection problem (Chambers and Dyson, 1976), which is of relevance in the float glass industry. Given a fixed integerN, generally between 2 and 6 (but potentially larger), we find theNbest sizes for intermediate stock from which to cut a roster of orders. An objective function is formulated with the purpose of minimizing wastage, and the problem is phrased as a combinatorial optimization problem involving the selection of columns of a cost matrix. Some bounds and heuristics are developed, and two exact algorithms (depth-first search and branch-and-bound) are applied to the problem, as well as one approximate algorithm (NOMAD). It is found that wastage reduces dramatically asNincreases, but this trend becomes less pronounced for larger values ofN(beyond 6 or 7). For typical values ofN, branch-and-bound is able to find the exact solution within a reasonable amount of time.