Director: Leigh Brooks
Among this year’s offerings at the BFI Flare Festival are quite a few films that celebrate queer people in music genres that, at first, don’t seem predisposed to attract queer people. Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music looks at lesbians working in country music, Sublime is a coming-of-age story from Argentina about a boy in a garage rock band in love with one of his bandmates while The Sound of Scars is a biography of the death metal band, Life of Agony, headed by trans woman Mina Caputo. The film is an edifying lesson in sex, drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, but for a music documentary there is very little music to be heard.
Of course, Leigh Brooks’ film was programmed at Flare because of Caputo’s story who came out as trans in 2011, but The Sound of Scars, named after the band’s most recent album, also considers the lives of bandmates Joey Zampella and Alan Robert. Each performer talks about their own personal battle. Caputo’s mother died from a heroin overdose when Caputo was young, and then she was a witness to violence when her grandfather attacked her grandmother. Caputo’s cousin Zampella had a tough childhood, too, regularly being beaten up by his father.
Robert has battled with depression his whole life and the images he draws capture his suicidal feelings. But the drawings and comics also act as therapy, much like the band itself for all the members. When they were young they would get into trouble, but forming that band probably stopped them from getting into more trouble from the police and from the gangs that they grew up alongside in Brooklyn. Their anger and disappointment could be redirected through music and lyrics.
Life of Agony began playing at a cub called L’Amour on Sunday nights, slowing building their fanbase. There is some old footage of them performing in the club while the crowd go crazy in the mosh pit. Fans would often climb to the stage and hurl themselves into the audience, trusting they would be caught. Later in 1995 a fan died while making a stage dive, an incident that still haunts the band today.
There is also footage of Caputo at this time, awkward with the microphone, back-turned to the crowd, which Caputo explains as the result of not being happy in her body, feeling that she was living a lie in the body of a man. After splits and a few changes in personnel, Caputo finally came out to Zampella and Robert. They worried about the future of the band, but Caputo was eager that Life of Agony continued. Their European fans were nothing but supportive.
All three performers are relaxed in front of the camera, and these interviews are joined by other talking heads of family members and singers, but strangely there is very little music in this documentary. Perhaps it was a licensing problem or perhaps Brooks thought that the music would be too loud and too shouty for the average viewer. While we obtain a sense of who these people are in private we don’t get enough of their public selves. The film starts and ends with the band members wandering around a haunted house about to shoot their new music video but we hear precious little of the song.
The Sound of Scars definitely shows the mental wounds that the band has picked up over the last thirty years, and the Brooks’ film is certainly intimate, but you can’t help but wish the volume was a hell of a lot louder.
The Sound of Scars was screened at BFI Flare 2022.
