Losier is a French film curator and she makes documentaries about underground artists. For seven years she followed Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020).
“The Ballad” starts just before P-Orridge met Lady Jaye. We get a few flashbacks to COUM, the early days of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, a peak into Genesis’ troubled youth and the fact that they did not want anybody to say what they are supposed to look like. Genesis refers to themselves as “we”, because of multiple personalities.
Experimenting with crossdressing and multiple identities, things really set off when Genesis meets Jay, a performance artist half their age. They fall madly in love and in stead of making ‘a combination of themselves’ (a baby), they decide to make themselves look like each other. Plastic surgery, breast implants, the same hair, the same make-up, the same cloths. Lady Jay is incorporated in the band, we get some live footage of concerts and then the tragic death of Lady J. The documentary ends soon after.
I have never been much of a follower of T.G., Psychic TV, etc., but this tragic love story gives an interesting peek into early industrial music and some of the people involved.
I am not entirely sure what the story of this documentary is. I do not think I heard of it before I noticed a screening on the 2025 Wave Gotik Treffen program. It seems that the documentary was funded with a crowdfunding and that the people who invested have already received their DVDs. The website of the label that released the film sells a “collectors edition” limited to 200 copies, which are: “a leftover item from our crowdfunding campaign”. Also tickets to a 12 June 2025 screening in Malmö are still available in the webshop, so it seems that the film premiered at the Wave Gotik Treffen (8 June 2025). IMDb.com says that the release date is 8 November 2024 though.
Anyway, a documentary about the rise and fall of Cold Meat Industry. It is mostly the story of Roger Karlsson (later “Karmanik”) (1965-) told by himself (in an interview) with additional information through interviews with people such as Tomas Pettersson (Ordo), both Peter Anderssons (Deutsch Nepal and Raison d’Être), Peter Bjärgo (Arcana), Håvard Ellefsen (Mortiis), Jouni Havukainen (In Slaughter Natives), etc., but also with people whose connections I do not really see.
I was quite in the middle of things, but on the other hand, it seems that I was not. Like I wrote before, I learned about CMI when Mortiis got in contact with Karmanik. I asked Roger if he was not afraid to become part of the black metal trend by that signing. He was not. The documentary shows that he was, but that there is more to that story. Mortiis certainly was a catalyst.
Karmanik originally was not from Linköping (pronounced “LIN-shə-ping” by the way), but he moved there as a punk. Experimenting with electronic music, he learned about other people who experimented with electronic music as well and in the end, he founded Cold Meat Industry. The label grew and the documentary is full of funny anecdotes and recollections of artists. There are stories about the first shows and festivals, growing friendships (“Karmanik family”), etc.
After a while it seemed that some of the artists had more potential than Karmanik could muster by himself in his basement (and later upper floor) and when after the signing of Mortiis the entire label and its artists entered the limelight, things became too much for Karmanik. It was around the same time that I started losing interest in the label and I did not really experience the tensions, bands that left the label or simply stopped and the bankruptcy of CMI in 2011. This was not only a ‘business thing’ though.
The viewer gets a very personal and very heavy look into the life of Karmanik himself. His oldest daughter is one of the interviewees. We hear about Karmanik’s drinking problems, breakdown, depression and his tiredness of living. This coincided with a growing dissatisfaction of some of the bands and in the end, CMI simply ‘bled out’.
It was only a few years later that a young Pole, Vlad Janicek of Death Disco concert promotions, wanted to celebrate his 30th birthday with a CMI reunion and this became the 30 years CMI festival in Stockholm in november 2017. No quarrels, no reproaches, just a party that saved Karmanik’s life and made some of the artists that had stopped, realise that people from all over the world were still interested in their music.
The documentary consists of interviews (in English, dubbed and subtitled), interesting archival material (video and photo) and weird news snippets the reasons for which elude me. There is some information that was new to me, but there are also things that I wonder why they are not included or mentioned.
I do not know how you have to get to see the documentary, but I guess/hope that there will be a regular release sometime soon.
An interesting documentary which gives a not too often seen idea of what goes on in the heads and lives of people involved in ‘dark music’. Recognisable and therefor not an easy watch.
Somehow, the creator of this documentary has been able to lay his hands on the extensive personal archives of Helene Bertha Amalie (Leni) Riefenstahl (1902-2003). This archive is for a small part unstructured, but for a large part extremely structured. The archive itself shows how obsessive Riefenstahl tried to document her own life according to her own picture of herself so that she could tell that story the way that she thought it should be.
The archives contains many, many photos, largely unknown, but also material that did not make it into Riefenstahl’s films, personal recordings, diaries, notes, the draft of her autobiography, recordings of phonecalls (!), etc. Veiel also used other footage, such as interviews, diaries and biographies of people in Riefenstahl’s life, etc. You get a view at Riefenstahl from a broad perspective.
What is clear is that Riefenstahl has tried to influence the way that people see her her entire life. We see giving her directions to the camera man who shoots an interview, questions that are not to be asked, remarks that makes her explode, putting stress on details that matter to her story, the fact that she has over 50 lawsuits against media that published something that she did not like, etc. In this way the viewer gets a look into a remarkable woman, but I doubt Riefenstahl would have been entirely content with the result.
Most stress is (of course, I would almost way) laid on Riefenstahl’s dealing with Nazi Germany and her films “Triumph des Willens” (1935) and “Olympia” (1936). On the one hand Riefenstahl tells that she was “magnetised” by Hitler, but she keeps stressing that Hitler was just the person who assigned her to make the film and she made “Triumph des Willens” from an art-perspective, not an ideological one. Here and there Veiel also shows Riefenstahl ‘unfiltered’. It is somewhat daring that also later in life Riefenstahl did not really try to distance herself of her employer of the time. She was of the opinion that she had made the right choices for her career in the circumstances.
Besides this you will also get a look into Riefenstahl’s youth, her parents, early films, relationships with people like Albert Speer (1905-1981), her marriage with Peter Jacob and -fortunately- her Africa expeditions.
An interesting documentary with a bit too much stress on the WWII period.
Currently, the 2025 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam is runnning and since Covid-19 they also have an online program. A part of the online program consists of films that have been featured on the festival before.
In “A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness” we more or less follow Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. The first third of the film is filmed in some sort of summercamp or commune which appears to be placed in the Finish countryside. Living in wooden cabins, sharing a sauna and having conversations, we follow a group of young adults and some of their children. There are long shots of nature and the like.
The second third focusses on Lowe as he makes a solo walk through nature. It seems that this part is shot in Estonia.
The third part is a black metal concert in a small place in Oslo. Lowe is a guitarist and occasional vocalist in an unnamed band.
A rap musical mockumentary of 30 minutes about two successful baseball players. Say what? Yep, there you have this amusing Netflix short in a nutshell.
Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were stars in the 1980’ies. Their story has highs, lows, abuse of steroids, lots and lots and money yet difficulties with social relations.
The story is told as some sort of rap musical, or as the creators call it a: “visual rap album”. Quite amusing actually!
In 1996, the small Scottish village of Dunblane was struck by a school shooting. In 2012 a similar thing happened in Sandy Hook, USA. The Scottish priest wrote his American colleague. He recognised many things that were happening in the USA from his own experience. The two started writing, built a friendship and eventually, the 80+ year old Scot travelled to America for the first memorial of the shooting there.
Using original footage, but also deeply personal interviews with both priests, Snyder manages to give an idea of the impact such an event has on people. Not just direct family, but the community as a whole. Even when in Scotland very strict gun laws were implemented after the Dunblane shooting, nothing much happend in the USA, so the same thing happens there again and again.
A 1:25 hour documentary about famous people’s experiences with psychedelics. Interviews with Sting, Carrie Fisher, Ben Fisher and many more are accompanied by hippie-style psychedelic animations. Nick Offerman appears as some sort of host.
Even though there are many warnings about bad trips, tips on what not to do or how not to do things, overall the documentary mostly focuses on the good sides of the use of psychedelics. The interviewees give very personal peeks into their experiences.
A short (16 min) documentary about John Shepherd who from an early age was obsessed with the idea of contacting extraterrestrial life. He started to teach himself to build equipment and over the decades a small box became a room full of equipment and eventually even an extra building next to the house of his grandparents who rose him.
Shepherd continued his project for decades, living as a hermit in rural USA. Then he ran out of money and had to abandon his life’s work. This documentary looks back on his active years.
London 1980’ies. Some Bowie fans want a place where they can express themselves and they find a club for Tuesday evening dance nights. “The Blitz” soon becomes a little scene, a bit of a queer and proto-gothic club.
Even though the documentary presents The Blitz as if was the primal soup of gender fluidity and the 1980’ies sound of music, similar things were -of course- happening in other places as well, also in the UK.
The Blitz was more the birthplace for the wave of pop music with Visage, Boy George and Spandau Ballet, while other similar scenes stayed more underground.
The documentary consists of interviews and old footage and makes it clear that a lot of things that we see today, were already there a few centuries ago. Also obvious is the enduring (and still present) of David Bowie and punk music. The Blitz started to lean towards more electronic music such as Kraftwerk.
A documentary about artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942-1994), written and narrated by Tilda Swinton and directed by the artist Isaac Julien and Bernard Rose.
You get snippets of old interviews with Jarman and newly recorded scenes in which Swinton thinks back of her time with Jarman and about how the film world developped.
At an early age Jarman discovered that he was attracted to men. Initially he did not think much of it, but others did. Later he rolled into the emerging gay scene and again later also the punk scene (and beyond, there is even a snippet of Genesis P-Orridge), various protest movements and of course the movie underground where he met Kenneth Anger and the like.
During the documentary you get a picture of a director who found himself periphery of the movie world with fairly successful films, but also productions that remained underground.
