Films

Hail the New Puritan

Part of We Have Always Been Here
A person with polka dots on their face, outfit, and in the background.

Still from Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan (1985) courtesy of EAI

Still from Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan (1985) courtesy of EAI

Introduced by Jon Davies, General Idea Fellow, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Hail the New Puritan is a highly stylized, faux-verité “docufantasy” about British dance sensation Michael Clark, contextualizing his “ballet-based but punk-fueled choreographies” in his glamorously and decadently queer, post-punk milieu in mid-1980s East London. Clark’s formidable choreography and his deliriously imaginative visual design is a study in the self-conscious fabrication (or fabulation?) of personality, the beguiling aura of a singular individual, and how the dynamic interplay with other “fantastics” can forge a cultural moment that reverberates long after its passing. – JD (Charles Atlas, 1986, 16mm to digital, 85 minutes)

Image caption: Still from Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan (1985) courtesy of EAI

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Two people look out of side-by-side windows in a brick building in this horizontal black and white photograph. The woman on our left has a double chin and a broad chest. She wears a polka-dotted dress and dark shawl or vest, and she leans forward with one hand on the sill. Her face is partially shadowed by a white window blind. An American flag hanging near this window billows across the right two-thirds of the picture, entirely hiding the second person’s head. That person wears a coat buttoned up to a rounded collar. They hold one hand near their chin and the other by their waist. The flag has eight columns of stars. The work is signed and dated in the white margin below: “1955 HOBOKEN” to the left and “Robert Frank” to the right.

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