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>>Girls Rock! documents the triumphs and
travails of the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls

BANDING TOGETHER: Girls Rock!

by MALCOLM FRASER

Since 2001, the Portland, Oregon-based Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls has offered eight to 18-year-old girls a crash course in the power of rock, with a strong dose of feminist spirit. Famous musical femmes such as Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and the Gossip’s Beth Ditto run down lessons on musicianship and rock history, with courses on body image and self-defence thrown in for good girl-power measure.

Arne Johnson and Shane King’s film Girls Rock! documents the week-long camp in the summer of 2005, focusing on four of its attendees: Laura, a goofily extroverted death metal fan; Misty, a badass former gang member and group home resident; Palace, a pint-sized screamer with a latent diva attitude, and Amelia, a geeky composer of outsider noise-rock anthems. Through the girls’ travails and triumphs, Johnson and King reveal the camp’s empowering spirit, as well as the myriad social and personal issues among young girls that the camp valiantly tries to counteract.

Reached at his San Francisco home, co-director Johnson recounts how he and King, friends since childhood, came up with the idea for the documentary after Johnson heard Brownstein mention the camp during a speaking appearance. After this flash of inspiration, the film itself didn’t have an easy start.

“We started off having to persuade the camp to let us make it; that was sort of the biggest hurdle to cross,” Johnson recalls. “They were very apprehensive, because they’d had a couple of people try to shoot things there who wanted to turn it into an American Idol competition, so they’d been wary about it. Once they saw that we sort of got what they were doing, they were very open to us.”

Indeed, although the film might appear at first glance to belong to the ever-burgeoning “niche competition documentary” subgenre (Spellbound, Air Guitar Nation, The King of Kong etc.), the camp’s decidedly left-coast approach is in fact anticompetitive, attempting to subvert the girls’ inclinations towards bullying and social hierarchy and steer them in a more collaborative and inclusive direction. In the film, this leads to some uncomfortable moments where the camp counsellors have to reconcile their idealistic ethics with the girls’ Darwinian group dynamics.

OUTSIDER PERSPECTIVE: Arne Johnson and Shane King

Dark but inspiring

The drama of the camp is broken up with animated sequences that flash grim statistics about young girls’ self-esteem issues, illustrating the challenges that confront them in stark, depressing terms. These alarming numbers, along with the girls’ candid discussion of their personal torments, add an undercurrent of socio-political criticism, which darkens the film’s exuberant spirit somewhat but also gives it a lot more depth.

During the film’s successful run on the festival circuit, Johnson and King were constantly confronted with the question of what two dudes were doing making such a female-centric film. Johnson describes the experience with frustration before concluding that their outsider status gave them a special perspective.

“We feel like, in some ways, we were naïve. There were a lot of things that came out of the film, that the girls were telling us, that were shocking and really upsetting to us, that to a woman might have been sort of part of their daily life. We felt like we were being led into this world that we’d been sitting right next to our whole lives, and had somehow been oblivious to.”

Although the film’s perspective on girls’ self-image is definitely sobering, the efforts of the camp and its participants are ultimately inspiring. “What you constantly hear from different members of the rock camp is that what they’re doing is planting seeds… what they wanna do is give each of the girls this moment where they feel completely free and empowered,” says Johnson.

“[The camp’s] ideal dream is letting these girls back into the world with a little bit more of the feeling that they can speak for themselves. We have that same hope with the movie, that people will see the film and wanna go to Rock ’n’ Roll Camp, or start their own camp, or get excited about doing whatever they wanna do. That’s the kind of social movement the camp is hoping to spawn—not a specific kind, more like a giant network of girls who don’t give a shit what people think of them!”

Girls Rock! opens this
Friday, June 6

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