Hell on Wheels: Women's Roller Derby film documentary

Another night at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and tonight I watched a documentary, Hell on Wheels, directed by Bon Ray, about the recent rebirth of women's roller derby, which took place in Austin, Texas, 2001. My expectation was to see a film about the character and motivation of the individual women, but instead what the film documented over the course of several years was the initial organization of the league, its split, and emergence of one league from this split. The issue that provides suspense in the film is whether this league will put the focus more on the model of the skaters enjoying the camaraderie and skating and less on running a business with a management staff in order to make profit.

There are several types of scenes that recur throughout the film. Group discussions, which often become arguments are common up until the very end of the film. The main issue of controversy is how to run the organization, how to spend the money, and who leads it and how much power are they given. There are interviews, usually quite brief, with individual skaters. There are scenes from training, from practice, from the games, as well as the injuries that seem quite common, and a few quite serious that result.

While the focus of this film is understandable--to present the nitty-gritty, often contentious discussion and argument that is involved in setting up the league and determining its structure and goals--it inherently does not seem to make for good film scenes: anyone who has ever sat in on an organizational meeting knows that they can be protracted, contentious, and a hassle that you are happy when concluded. Thus, I found myself fearing in the film, oh, no, not another discussion and argument. Furthermore, without any narrator who intruded to clue the viewer in and provide more information about the context, I often felt lost. The director clearly wanted to leave this narrator out in the name of making the film more realistic--you saw things as the participants saw them--but this I believe this made it more difficult for the viewer to get involved in the film, in terms of better understanding what was going on.

Another disagreement I have with the film is its focus on the logistics of forming and operating an organization. With this focus we see many taped scenes of arguments and bickering about just what to do and how to handle the logistics of running what proves to be a costly enterprise--renting a hall, attracting paying spectators, finding training space, buying skates, dealing with frequent and costly injuries, some quite serious. I suppose someone interested in the business aspect of this enterprise would be curious about this aspect of women's roller derby, but I was not particularly so.

True, this gives you the nitty gritty and unpleasant, yet necessary perspective on what is quite a difficult start up venture. This is truly a realist and documentary film! But in my view it just doesn't make particularly dramatic film. Personally, I would be curious to learn more about the personalities of the participants--what draws them to roller derby and why they enjoy it. For instance, a woman in the film observes that the skaters were loners who didn't fit in, but this observation isn't developed. Or the entire question of using sex to sell the sport, that is, wearing sexy outfits to draw an audience. We get a few brief explanations that the skaters are okay with that, but I sense there is more to it than simply a pat answer. Or probably there are a variety of answers to this questions, it depends on which skater you would ask.

This film constitutes quite an ambitious ground level view of the formation of a women's roller derby league. The director and his friends and associates spent several years on this project and their purpose was to document the messy process that led to the league's formation. In this they do succeed. But if you are interested in learning more about the personality of the skaters, more about their issues of gender, if they have any, then this film may not satisfy you.