Fugazi - Instrument

Jem Cohen - Instrument:Ten Years with the Band Fugazi Not your average concert video, this nearly two-hour collection of Fugazi footage, compiled over ten years of the Washington, D.C., punk band’s career, is a hypnotic and imaginatively shot film. Fugazi’s earliest shows are particularly frenzied: a girl in a dress writhing around on-stage, a guy in his boxer shorts hopping around like a nut case, singer Guy Picciotto climbing through a basketball hoop, scenes that are more like a voodoo ritual than your normal band/audience relationship. Live, these four guys form such a tightly wound unit that they can take off in any direction they want like a jazz band with any member choosing from 80 or so songs. Also, there’s footage of Fugazi taking abuse from their audiences brought on in part by singer Ian MacKaye’s noble but humorless attempts at calming down a few jerks that show up at their concerts. At one point, MacKaye pulls a drunk idiot from the crowd and asks him to apologize for spitting on him, but it’s just an embarrassing scene for the both of them and MacKaye is forced to remove the guy from the show via a headlock. Filmmaker Jem Cohen includes shots of a guy running down the street, Fugazi shopping at the market, and all sorts of surreal images, shot mostly on Super 8, which gives the film more the quality of an experimental student film than a documentary. Some of the best footage is of people standing outside of Fugazi shows, uncomfortable as the camera lingers on them. Instrument also demonstrates how Fugazi’s main political statement is how the band conducts its everyday life and business according to its members’ own beliefs, not anybody else’s. ~ Adam Bregman, All Movie Guide