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Vancouver is the City of Glass, a phrase borrowed from Douglas Coupland’s 2000 book of the same name, an insider’s guide and photo essay of a city re-built for Expo ’86. It’s a name reflecting renewal that unwittingly points up the fragility of the city’s psyche, a collective identity based upon the city’s perceived difference from everything east of the Rockies. It’s also Terminal City, the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which suggests a narrowing horizon that is at odds with visions of the city as a unique place of possibility.
But it’s fair to say the nickname that best describes this place I’ve called home for the last three years is No Fun City. A dynamic, international urban centre that nonetheless lacks diversity in terms of entertainment types and the pedigree of ownership of existing art spaces, restaurants and music venues. Vancouver has an unfortunate history with choking out cultural spaces as municipal government focuses instead on commercial-residential developments. In combination with a maze of liquor laws, zoning rules, and other municipal by-laws that dictate the terms of such businesses, it represents what many people consider to be the worst aspects of runaway development in a city that is becoming less accessible to young people hoping to make it a home.
No Fun City, the 2010 Canadian film conceived and written by Melissa James and co-directed/co-produced by Kate Kroll, sets out to document Vancouver’s inability to recognize the long-term value of independent and artist-run spaces by telling the story of independent and illegal punk venues in the run-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics. Supported in part by the British Columbia Arts Council and a popular success in its appearances at a range of film festivals including DOXA (Vancouver), Pop Montreal, and CMJ (New York), No Fun City fits nicely in the lineage of other nonfiction portraits of music subcultures, most recently the gonzo documentation of noise artists in the self-titled Friends Forever (Ben Wolfinsohn, USA, 2001) but dating back further to the ethnographic project of Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, USA, 1981) or any number of first-wave punk rockumentaries. It...