Final Rating: 3.5/5
Disco’s Revenge, directed by Omar Majeed and Peter Mishara, is a fascinating documentary about the origins of disco and the New York club scene in the 70s. In their exploration of a genre and the surrounding subculture, Majeed and Mishara interview influential DJs and musicians like Nile Rodgers and Fab Five Freddy, but also clubgoers and music journalists of the time with first-hand accounts of the scene.
The film opens with shots of Disco Demolition Night, a Chicago White Sox promotion held in July of 1979 in which a stadium full of people burned thousands of disco records. The footage used directly recalls photos and footage of Nazi book burnings in World War II – a comparison made more explicit later in the film – and sets the tone for the film. While it’s tempting to see that event as people expressing their displeasure with a style of music that they felt was overplayed, the music is inseparable from the culture.
Flashing back to the early 70s, Disco’s Revenge paints a rosy picture of music clubs – later “discotheques” – as safe havens for LGBT people and black folks, regardless of class or resources. Many clubgoers recall their first visit to a discotheque with awe, their introduction to a world previously entirely unknown to them, where they were unconditionally welcomed in. A notable section of the film breaks down the career of Sylvester an androgynous disco and soul singer in the 70s and 80s. Sylvester faced discrimination on account of his open homosexuality and uncompromising flamboyancy, but saw success in the disco scene despite – perhaps even because – of his personality.
Sylvester’s is one of several stories in Disco’s Revenge showing the welcoming nature of the culture around the genre. Like many of those stories, it’s illustrative, but shallow. Majeed and Mishara succeed in getting so many great stories about disco that the film’s greatest flaw becomes its lack of focus.
With just a few replaced scenes, the film could be a comprehensive history of the career of Chic’s Nile Rodgers, or an exploration of the influence of disco on the modern fashion industry, or even a deep dive into the rise of house music – which one interviewee cheekily calls “disco’s revenge.” While the movie works as a history lesson on the birth of disco, it has trouble articulating the elements that led to its “fall,” or indeed, properly arguing whether disco “fell” at all, or has simply been reborn as some new cultural force.
Majeed and Mishara collected incredible interviews and amazing footage to build their disco retrospective. The fatal flaw of Disco’s Revenge is that it simply doesn’t go deep enough. If ever there was a documentary film that ought to be a four-episode docuseries, Disco’s Revenge is it.
