Sir Drone

Director: Raymond Pettibon

1989 / 55min / DCP

One of a series of rough-edged lo-fi “home video” films turned out in the ’80s by visual artist Pettibon—who began his career in the hardcore punk scene, as something like the in-house artist at SST Records—Sir Drone is a two-day wonder about three teenagers trying to get a band together in the industrial wastes of Los Angeles, with performers, including artist Mike Kelley and Mike Watt (of the Minutemen), giving voice to Pettibon’s diatribes on ethics and aesthetics.

“Mike Watt of the Minutemen and artist Mike Kelley try to form a band at the birth of punk in Pettibon’s ‘new film about the new Beatles,’ shot on video over two days with Watt and Kelley mostly reading their lines off of cue cards that sometimes make it into frame. Pettibon ethers the aesthetics of this subculture (short vs. long hair, speed vs. grass) from the same critical and ironic distance that you find in his flyers for Black Flag, and Kelley and Watt are generously in on the joke: Kelley’s pathetic masculinity, Watt’s San Pedro econospeak, and the visual and textual rhetoric of Pettibon’s illustrations are all there. By tearing everything down, a kind of sweet home movie about male friendship and shared creation reveals itself.”—Ted Gerike

Q&A with director Ray Pettibon, moderated by writer and critic Nick Pinkerton, on Sunday, January 28th