Romuald Karmakar’s »Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea«, his second study of the electronic music scene, stood out among the many documentaries on musical topics shown at the last Viennale

Film is editing. This characterisation of cinema, put forward by classic filmmakers like Eisenstein and Pudovkin, is now no longer taken for granted, and with good reason. For decades, the use of increasingly manoeuvrable cameras and growing storage capacities has been leading to ever more mobile, longer takes and thus to a well-tested rhetoric of the sequence shot. In addition, the high quality of direct sound recording now offers substantial alternatives to off-screen commentaries or atmos added later. It is therefore amazing that Romuald Karmakar should still be criticised for not moving his camera in his documentary film about the electronic pop music scene. A criticism like that ignores basic formal characteristics such as shot widthy, camera movement, image depth and sound. And the desire motivating this criticism – the desire for sharper cuts, which is catered to on a daily basis not only by MTV, but in most cinema and TV presentations as well - certainly does not arise merely from preferences for more crudeness or less subtlety, for example. Rather, it derives from the classical modern concept that the technicised lifeworld can only be adequately depicted through the tension created by moderately changing perspectives. However, where the edited form of the images and films thus produced already emphasizes the mechanical nature per se, the concrete machine depicted quickly seems arbitrary. In contrast, in the following, I would like to discuss why two documentary films by Karmakar provide instructive impressions of the performance practice of electronic sound processing precisely because of their sequence shots.

Most of the altogether twelve live acts (eight different duos and one solo artist) documented by »Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea« (2005) use familiar visualisation patterns of pop music. Fixmer/McCarthy, for example, stress the front position of a singer who seeks contact with the audience through his verbal message and vehement gestures. The orgiastic, almost self-destructive exertions of the soloist T.Raumschmiere, pay tribute to the familiar ecstatic shows of hard rock. And the two female singers in Cobra Killer also cite proven rituals, falling from the stage onto the upstretched hands of their fans and being carried through the auditorium. »Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea« contains barely any performance that goes beyond traditional codes of the stage. Any expectation that the film will open new spaces for the contemplative awareness of rhizomatically complex ambient sounds will be largely disappointed, for example. But it is also not true either that Karmakar uses the fetishistic image production of the bands he films to help their marketing. Precisely this is thwarted by his concept of the sequence shot, which often makes the theatrical, heroic or erotic gestures of the musicians seem awkward, banal, casual. When, for example, the singer Douglas McCarthy, to the sound of »Nutsplit«, has to wait backstage for an unexpectedly long time, in an »unapproachable« pose, legs wide apart, dressed in chic black with dark sunglasses, we do not see this scene just as a short insert. Instead, it is unusually long: during it, the singer gradually loses his composure, washes out his mouth, does a spontaneous dance to pass the time, and finally starts chatting. And the pictures showing the performance by Alter Ego do not highlight Jörn Elling Wuttke’s striking grimaces when he turns up his bass control in »Nasty Dollars« either. Instead, the prolonged gaze of the camera much more clearly shows the excessiveness and isolation of Wuttke’s gestures, which seem both zestful and insincere.

It is the precarious relationship of the musician’s body to the sterility of the electronically produced sound that is made apparent in these scenes, a relationship that Diedrich Diedrichsen has illuminatingly described in his article » Unheimlichkeit, Pulse, Subjektlosigkeit, Befreiung« (Eng: »Uncanniness, Pulses, Subjectlessness, Liberation«).1 Unlike classical instrumentalists, who accent the rhythmic structure of their playing in an organic fashion, performers of electronic sounds are often strangely disconnected from the beat: in the middle of the music, they suddenly stop miming the rhythm or do not show physical reaction to a beat until a while after it has occurred; or they emphasise a sequence of accents in an abrupt and exaggerated fashion.

This can be seen in an even purer form in the film that preceded »Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea«, »196 BPM«, which in particular documents a performance by Helmut Josef Geier, alias DJ Hell, in a Berlin disco: the putting on of vinyl discs, the pitching of the revolution speed, the operation of the mixing desk, the attention moving back and forth between the sound produced in the room by the loudspeakers and the sound options available at the desk, tested using headphones. In between the handling of the turntable, there are the DJ’s encouraging hand signals to the audience, his autarchic dance movements, his motionlessness, or even more casual acts such as drinking and talking. »Hell at Work« is what Karmakar called this third chapter of his film of 2002, whose previous parts show other scenes on the fringe of the Berlin Love Parade: things happening on the street in front of a disco (in »Intro«), as well as an informal group of dancers gathered in front of a caravan kiosk near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (»Gabba«). Both of these scenarios anticipate the repertoire of the corresponding, delaying, interrupting and disconnected physical impulses of the DJ scene. Each time, the techno music provokes displacement activities: in »Gabba«, for example, when the kiosk owner drums boisterously on the roof of the caravan as if he were on a brief high, or in »Intro«, when a passer-by takes the initiative and, uninvited, takes up position in front of the fixed camera to try out a performance. Such happenings in a way underline the laconism of the title of the third chapter, »Hell at Work«. For, as far as physical impulses go, the »working « DJ is not very different from the anonymous ravers outside. In all three locations, the action is connected, though not continuously, with the repetitive music found there, alternating between excitement, synchronicity and indifference. So we may suppose here, too, as Diedrichsen explains in his article, that, in their performance of »machine music«, the protagonists are enjoying »the pleasures of lack of responsibility, of carefreeness … the escape from the subjectivity that is always reflected in actions«. But against this theory on the exonerative effect of machine music, it can at least be objected that the techno sound is partly what motivates the street protagonists to perform the strange acts outlined above.

Improvisations of subjectivity like these can be followed in Karmakar’s films in an amazingly nuanced way. This is not just because of the unedited continuity of their sequence shots, but also because of the camera positions he selects: sometimes fixed, sometimes mobile. These positions are not only structured by the pre-determined action radius of the protagonists but, conversely, also challenge the protagonists in their performances. This basically draws attention to the relativity of each social role model constituted in the films discussed here, but also points out the effective imaginative space for an intensifying participation of the viewers.

»Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea« was awarded the Arte Documentary Film Prize for the best German documentary film at the 29th Duisburg Film Week (2005).

www.panterafilm.de/btd

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---