East Punk Memories

L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between opens memorably: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” Few representations of social and personal memory could more compellingly validate this idea than the documentary East Punk Memories. Members representing the harshest punk bands of the 1980s in Hungary (ETA, Aurora, CPG, QSS, Kretens, Modells, and Bandanas)—ten men and two women—were queried twenty years later (around 2004) to reflect on the olden days, their former friends, the subculture they had formed, and the social environment that spawned it. The second set of discussions addressed the seismic shifts the subjects had experienced in their lives in the wake of the momentous change they helped usher in, even though unconsciously, by decrying János Kádár's regime in Hungary. The film is thus a documentary within a documentary, shot in its entirety by Loucile Chaufour, a filmmaker, composer, and rock musician. (She played in...