2018
Film Comment
Nellie Killian Writes About Tour Without End
"Following the fictional band Munchausen through New York’s alternative music scene, Laura Parnes’s satirical doc-fiction hybrid Tour Without End chronicles a milieu pinched by local hyper-gentrification and spun by national politics.
Supported by a veritable who’s who of downtown luminaries (Eileen Myles, Gary Indiana, Kathleen Hanna, K8 Hardy, and more) playing versions of themselves, Munchausen (played by the The Wooster Group’s Kate Valk and New York City Players’ Jim Fletcher) serve as our guide to a contemporary DIY world as vibrant as it is precarious (of the 14 venues featured in the film, at least four have been forced to shutter). Elder statesman of New York bohemia, Munchausen thread the needle between several decades of New York art subcultures, mixing with an intergenerational group of artists and taking a long view of a shared culture dominated by the young.
Shot between 2014 and early 2018, the film never leaves the political situation far from the frame, with our players entering the eye of the storm on a brief sojourn to Cleveland during the RNC and rallying the community in the post-election spiral, exemplified by a show-stopping performance by The Julie Ruin the night after Trump’s election.
Between performances by bands like Eartheater, Shannon Funchess, Macy Rodman and Youthquake, Parnes stages semi-scripted scenes creating a portrait of a living artistic community; gossiping backstage, humoring tone-deaf marketing pitches, enduring patronizing interviewers, comforting one another, enjoying each other’s work, and attempting to make sense of our increasingly disturbing historical moment.”
-Nellie Killian