Punk was more than the music. It was an attitude that swept through culture like an angry roar. It thundered in the Bay Area's dank clubs, but it could also be detected in brash works made by bratty artists intent on aesthetic insurrection. Everything in this program is about loud, whether it's the sonorous outbursts of the Avengers, the Mutants, or the Dils in Mindaugis Bagdon's searing doc Louder, Faster, Shorter, The Residents's prepunk proddings in Third Reich and Roll, or the memorable mayhem of the Offs in Richard Gaikowski's Deaf/Punk. A caustic collage of found images, The Units' Training Film was a visual backdrop for this groundbreaking punk-syntho band. While the music was churning in the clubs, video artists were mangling the medium. Whether it be Dale Hoyt's last gasps of anxious youth, Barney Haynes's sonic travels through the wasteland, or Ivar Smedstad's slice-and-dice orchestrations, the proof was in the pummeling. Finally, sluggo selections from Target Video's Joe Rees take us into the core of the hardcore maelstrom. — Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive

The Harvard Film Archive is screening selections from the Pacific Film Archive's series "Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area." Other screenings from this program will take place at ArtsEmerson on Saturday, September 24 and at MassArt on Wednesday, September 28.