Mary Millington in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

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Though a social movement that its practitioners declared dead within eighteen months of its 1976 conception, punk rock has endured through almost three decades of afterlife. Filmed and released in the first wake of a musical revolution embodied by such one-chord wunderkinds as The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1980) was meant as a deliberate, cynical, and bald-faced attempt to cash in on a generation of kids hungry for some authentic thing to latch on to. Partial documentary, a bit of in-concert performance, a precursor to the coming promotional video as faux art statement, and one of the earliest film appearances by future media saturator Sting, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle simultaneously marked the passing of punk and inaugurated its endless second-comings.