On Thursday night House of Vans London, a skate park cum arts venue, and Dogwoof films continued their programme of free films with a presentation of Amy Berg’s ‘Janis: Little Girl Blue.’
If you’ve never been to one of their film showings before it’s worth knowing that House of Vans isn’t an ordinary movie theatre. Their theatre space is a vaulted room with three or four levels of DIY wooden boxed platforms with mobile three-inch thick pillows for your back and bum. Casual’s the word. The vibe is that of seeing a movie at your friend’s cool flat with a musty old smell of windowless dungeon, which is packed to capacity with strangers; most of whom, piercings and body ink galore, probably ran there because the building doesn’t show up on citymapper.
If you don’t mind the slightly panic inducing movement of someone needing to get out mid-movie and possibly toppling over you, the movie series looks amazing; it is also very, very uniquely free. The producers have a specifically young crowd in mind. They’ve even set up a table with little free cups of popcorn which vanished before they had time to put out the salt. The movie began without much fanfare and about ten minutes late. People continuously wandered in for the first half hour, running across the projector and whispering inaudible apologies to no one in particular. Not knowing precisely when it would start, I went out to examine the bar before seeing the security guard close the doors to the theatre space behind me. I ran back in just in time to catch the psychedelic colors of ‘Janis: Little Girl Blue’s’ title cards (and to discover that some guy had elongated his leg on the platform above me giving me the opportunity to spend the film nuzzling his shoe like a telephone). I never got a full glimpse at the bar menu, but based on the crowd, looked like it sold mostly Red Stripes and wines.
After the opening sequence, the movie took off with a bang. It’s not by any means a slow moving biography. Luckily (because my back hurt), it doesn’t belabour the finer points of the life of female rock and roll pioneer Janis Joplin, but instead gets to the action fast. It predictably starts with a narrowly avoidable biopic trope of a young Janis Joplin growing up as an outsider in small town Texas. Since director Amy Berg knows how groan-inducing this can be, however, she flits through it rapidly. Instead she almost only explores the emotional abuses that Janis suffered early on (she was famously voted ‘ugliest man’ on campus at university) to later use them as a framework for understanding Janis’ deep seeded suffering. Yes, Berg says, Janis Joplin was a feminist, yes, she was way ahead of her time and yes, she had a once in a generation voice. Berg mostly assumes that you know this and thankfully gives only enough information on those points to introduce a newbie to the cultural importance of the artist. In addition to laying out Joplin’s historical significance, Berg adeptly compiles interview and concert footage that show Janis as tragically no different from any other girl who grew up in Texas and wanted to be pretty and hoped for a husband. In a nice stroke of casting, Chan Marshall (Cat Power) narrates letters that Janis sent. In one Janis says, “I know how to be a pop star, but I don’t know how to be a woman.” It’s a provocative lens through which to view the rock star and enables a richer understanding of famous lyrics like “a woman left lonely” and “cry baby.”
by Jonathan Glick
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