G.B. Jones

The Troublemakers

May 20 - June 3, 2005

"Opting Out"

Over the past twenty years Dennis Day (see Neurotics Anonymous) and GB Jones (see also The Power and The Glory) have consistently explored queer identity from the perspectives of pop and punk respectively. From growing up gay in Newfoundland to Toronto's underground queercore scene their work has deliberately inhabited the critical margins, opting out of the treadmills of consumer culture and mainstream gay lifestyle.

The Troublemakers follows the lives of four down-on-their-luck characters. Surrounded by the vestiges of conspicuous consumption such as cars, clothes, toys and magazines, they exist outside of the culture of consumerism - instead creating their own. Struggling to survive outside of society while heeding the call to their own desires, they utilize the aesthetics of poverty to fashion their lives. By devising strategies to navigate a surveillance society, they either evade or perform for cameras everywhere.

The Troublemakers is equally fact and fiction, documentary and performance, home movie and narrative - the line is blurred and distinctions meaningless. Shot in the condemned home of director G.B. Jones and lead actors Caroline Azar and Bruce laBruce, the total cost of the film was the price of 7 catridges, 3 minutes in length, of Super 8 film plus developing and transfer to video with a one-to-one ratio. There are no outtakes.

GB Jones has worked in a variety of media including moviemaking, music, publications and drawing since 1985. Her work has been shown throughout Europe, the U.S.A., Australia, Japan and Canada. She is the director of two films, The Yo-Yo Gang, released in 1992 and The Troublemakers, released in 1990 and subsequently re-editied and released in 1998. The latter film was chosen by W 139 Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden as their entry in The World Wide Video Festival in The Netherlands in 1998. GB Jones continues to make films and right now she is working on her latest, The Lollipop Generation.

 

From SceneandHeard.ca:

Next into the VCR was GB Jones’ The Troublemakers, a punk-inspired film about self-expression, understanding, and the reality of living in the 1970s.

“We were all really poor so I decided to make a film about what our lives were like, to really honestly portray how we were getting by,” Jones typed in an email interview. “So, on one level it’s a document of how people living on the margins of society manage to exist. But on another level, I wanted the film to capture the dichotomy between how society views people like us and how we choose to be portrayed on film.

“The world views us through their two way mirrors and cameras and articles in the paper when we get arrested and all the apparatus of the surveillance society we live in. But also there's a view of ourselves, the one the actors let me capture on film; that despite this poverty we live with a sense of style. That's why I describe The Troublemakers as being about the 'Aesthetics of Poverty'.”

With a style all its own – raw, dirty, honest – GB Jones, who has been making films for at least 20 years, tells a very different tale in The Troublemakers. The film is not about the obvious, it’s about the honesty that lurks behind the scenes, in people’s minds.