Lectures on Tap - Punk Cinema: The Concrete & Chaos of LA on the Big Screen
About this Event
📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email
🧠 Lecture: "Punk Cinema: The Concrete & Chaos of LA on the Big Screen"
🎙️ Speaker: Dr. John Trafton
Los Angeles is often imagined through sunshine, celebrity, and suburban fantasy. Punk cinema ripped through that veneer, revealing a city of abandoned malls, concrete riverbeds, cheap apartments, dead-end jobs, and communities stitched together from noise, anger, and survival.
From Suburbia and The Decline of Western Civilization to Repo Man and beyond, this lecture explores how punk films transformed LA into a landscape of rebellion, exposing the hidden city lurking beneath Hollywood’s mythmaking. Part film history, part urban history, and part mixtape of cinematic chaos, Dr. Trafton will ask what punk cinema can still teach us about alienation, authenticity, and imagining another Los Angeles.
Dr. John Trafton is a film historian, writer, and educator specializing in cinema, historical memory, and the cultural landscapes of Los Angeles. He teaches film history and aesthetics at Chapman University and is the author of the forthcoming book Los Angeles and Film: A Cultural History (Bloomsbury, 2026). His work explores how movies shape the ways we experience cities, history, and everyday life, with a special focus on noir streets, punk subcultures, and the city’s hidden geographies.
Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌
Agenda
7:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.
7:55 PM – Host introduction
8:00 PM – Lecture begins
8:45 PM – Audience Q&A
9:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round
9:30 PM – Wrap up.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 39.19
