‘Beyond The Screams’: The documentary that tells the story of Latino punk
There are hundreds of documentaries about punk. Most of them tell roughly the same story. They start in New York or London, make a stop in Los Angeles, eventually arrive in Washington DC, and before long, you’ve heard about the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Black Flag and Minor Threat all over again.
Más allá de los gritos (Beyond The Screams) takes a different route.
Directed in 1999 by Martin Sorrondeguy, the singer of Chicago hardcore band Los Crudos, queercore outfit Limp Wrist and founder of the Lengua Armada Discos label, it’s one of the few films devoted entirely to the Latino and Chicano punk movement that grew from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. If you’ve ever wondered what was happening just a few miles east of the better-documented punk scenes, this is a pretty good place to start.
Sorrondeguy was also the right person to make it. He wasn’t arriving years later with a notebook and a camera asking people what happened. By then he’d already spent years living inside that world, touring with Los Crudos, putting on DIY gigs and releasing records through Lengua Armada. Most of the people sitting in front of his camera weren’t strangers. They were musicians he’d shared stages with, argued with, slept on floors with and probably driven around the country in broken-down vans.
That familiarity gives the film a relaxed quality that’s difficult to fake.
The Chicano punk movement was forged by young, politically aware Latinos resisting discrimination and police brutality in the barrio while trying to raise awareness of border, citizenship and immigration issues. In California, opposition to Governor Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187 became one of the defining causes of the scene during the 1990s, but the documentary wisely doesn’t reduce everything to politics. It spends just as much time talking about records, clubs, friendships and the excitement of discovering that punk could belong to you as much as anybody else.
One of the nicest surprises is seeing how many great bands came out of East Los Angeles. Places like The Vex became legendary gathering spots for groups including The Plugz, The Bags, The Brat, The Zeros, Felix and the Cats, Los Angelinos and The Stains. If most punk histories make it sound as though everything happened at CBGB or on the Sunset Strip, Beyond The Screams quietly reminds you that another scene was flourishing at exactly the same time, developing its own identity without asking anybody else’s permission.
That’s probably what I enjoyed most about the documentary. It never feels like it’s trying to correct the history books or demand recognition. Nobody spends the running time insisting that this was the “real” punk scene or the “forgotten” one. The people involved simply tell their stories, and by the end you realise you’ve been introduced to an entire chapter of American punk that somehow slipped between the cracks.
The other thing worth remembering is when the film was made. In 1999, a lot of the people involved were still relatively young. Clubs were still standing. Memories were fresh. Boxes of flyers and photographs hadn’t yet disappeared into skips or garages. In hindsight, Sorrondeguy captured the scene at exactly the right moment, before it became something that had to be reconstructed from fading memories and second-hand anecdotes.
I’m also a sucker for documentaries made by people who actually belong to the culture they’re documenting. There’s usually less myth-making and more small details: who lent who an amp, where everyone hung out after the gig, why one venue mattered more than another. Those little moments often tell you more than a dozen talking heads ever could.
If your knowledge of American punk begins with the Ramones and ends somewhere around Fugazi, Beyond The Screams fills in a sizeable gap. More importantly, it does so without ever feeling like homework.