Frank's silence and the sound of waiting to be found
Since the film reminded me of the introduction I had seen about underground punk bands in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, I went to search for relevant materials. I did not find the article IN my mind, but I found something else that might help me better understand some cultural phenomena mentioned in the film. The first was an article titled "Slavic,East European,and Eurasian Punk Alternative Publications:Challenges to Fugitive Materials," Written by Adams Kevin. Its focus is less on punk history itself and more on the collection and collation of relevant fugitive materials. These materials include but are not limited to manuscripts, posters, illegally distributed music tapes (as filmed in the film, for example, at the beginning, the band pasted live performance posters in the streets, and Frank secretly stuffed his own recorded music tapes into his sewn clothes for his friends to find a way to take them out) and underground music magazines. Because these works were often illegal or subject to severe distribution restrictions (Roksi, the first widespread pop rock magazine in the Soviet Union, for example, issued only six copies of each of the first three issues of the Soviet Press Law), it is difficult to find a fully preserved collection in official databases. Frank's "political psychosis" is also, to some extent, a metaphor for the reality of the underground artists of that era in the film, who are forced to stop speaking, their silence is purged, erased, and then completely lost their voice when it's all over. Whether or not these lost voices can be recovered, the howling of pain that they have missed, depends at this stage of history more on whether we listeners can recover them from those fragmentary memories.
