Podcast #31: Let Fury Have the Hour

MusicFilmWeb: See It Loud

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Numerous films have explored music as a form of protest, and at first glance Let Fury Have the Hour seems cut from the same cloth, with its all-star cast of politically minded artists. But not long into Antonino D’Ambrosio’s rousing documentary, it becomes clear that something both more broad and more nuanced is afoot. Very loosely based on D’Ambrosio’s book of the same name, a collection of essays about the life and legacy of Joe Strummer, Let Fury Have the Hour examines the nexus of creativity, community, and social and economic justice via a fast-moving collage of interviews, images, and songs that is part history lesson, part hootenanny.

Laying the foundation with a primer on how, in the film’s view, the twin ’80s onslaughts of Reagan and Thatcher replaced a social fabric built on shared citizenship with individualism and consumerism, Let Fury Have the Hour features some 50 artists (and the odd economist or historian) talking about the forces and events that forged their worldview and shaped, to use the film’s mantra, their “creative response.” The cast includes filmmaker John Sayles, comedian Lewis Black, visual artist Shepard Fairey, playwright Eve Ensler, novelists Edwidge Danticat and Hari Kunzru, and musicians like Ian MacKaye, Billy Bragg, Chuck D, Tom Morello, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Oakland rapper Boots Riley, and extravagantly mustachioed gypsy punk Eugene Hutz (whose acoustic rooftop jam of “Immigraniada” gives the movie an emblematic exclamation point).

Antonino D'Ambrosio

More than protest or politics per se, Let Fury Have the Hour is about exploring connections – between skateboarding and social justice, activism and Afrobeat, the old counterculture and the new – and how the forces unleashed by punk and hip hop have already started remaking the world. D’Ambrosio spent a large part of November touring the film at festivals across Ireland (it opens a US cinema run December 14 in New York); we caught up with him last week at the Northwest Film and Music Fest in Sligo and decided to resuscitate our See It Loud podcast for a discussion of art, politics, and creative community-building.

Thanks very much to Sligeach Films for hosting this interview and to Colin McKeown, Tara McGowan, and the whole team at the Northwest Film and Music Fest and The Model Sligo. The opening music for See It Loud is by Los Musicos de Jose and comes from Mevio’s Music Alley.

Movies in this one:

Let Fury Have the Hour

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