PRAGUE’S CINEMATIC JUKEBOX
by Jonathan Gainer

PopMatters, IL
03/pragues-cinematic-jukebox/
Dec 14 2007

The turning leaves weren’t the only autumnal attraction back in Prague
this October. For its fourth year, the MOFFOM festival – short for
Music on Film, Film on Music – unspooled in a kaleidoscopic gaze at
our musical past and present. Over 60 filmmakers and musicians from
21 countries made their way along with 10,000 viewers to Prague’s Kino
Lucerna, Europe’s oldest, and arguably most beautiful, cinema complex.

As a niche festival centering on the infinitely-variable genre of the
music film, MOFFOM combines ardent affection for both mediums with
a belief that bringing the two together will produce a transcendent
sensory experience. "The films have a smaller audience than narrative
features do," MOFFOM Program Director Keith Jones told me, "But they
have enormous power, both to entertain and to inform, because they’re
truthful and honest and based in reality."

They also offer rarefied glimpses at musical contexts unknown outside
musicological circles. It was like stepping into Aladdin’s lamp,
complete with surround-sound. And by lacing an ambitious five-day
schedule of celluloid seances with shin-digs and live performances,
the festival format seemed to pay homage to Prague’s century-spanning
alchemical traditions while enticing participants to ponder the
interrelationship between sound and screen.

"Seeing a piece of visual art can really change the way I perceive
reality and my place in reality," says multi-instrumentalist and
composer Fred Frith, whose musical and cinema compositions are
the subject of this year’s MOFFOM retrospective. "I think hearing
something can do that, too. And in some ways, hearing reaches places
that visual things cannot reach."

While music in fiction film usually punctuates or underscores the
emotional resonance of stories, many of the documentary films on view
reversed this relationship. In screening after screening, music was
the story: alongside punk, funk, jazz, reggae and avant classical
performers, there were also Iranian santour, Belgian chanson, Russian
underground, tango, jazz, samba, nomadic, country and fado musicians.

It was almost too much to see, too much to hear, were it not for the
genre’s ability to root the grooves and leitmotifs in communities
beyond earshot.

My first eye-opener was the role a mansion in the New York Berkshires
played in mapping and expanding the history of America’s native art
form, jazz. Legendary indie-producer Ben Barenholtz (Barton Fink
Requiem for a Dream) presented his directorial debut film, Music
Inn, which chronicles the evolution of a 1950’s summer hideaway for
musicians into the first "school for jazz" and the context of legendary
collaborations. Roundtable discussions led by musicological sages
Alan Lomax and Marshall Stearns united so many pioneering virtuosos
that it would be easier to cite the ranks of canonical jazz masters
who did not attend. What emerges is a gripping portrait of a milieu
converging upon its own history, and in so doing finding the confidence
to riff its way through an ever-widening legacy.

One branch of that improvisational heritage is freestyle hip-hop,
which director Kevin Fitzgerald tracks with his grainy, flava-laden
documentary Freestyle: Tthe Art of Rhyme. Taking the lacerated,
street-level texture of hip-hop mix tapes as an aesthetic mandate,
Fitzgerald weaves a battle-cycle between reigning rhyme-slinger
Supernatural and contender Craig G. into a polyphonic tableau of this
combative urban sub-culture and its precarious lyricism.

With projector lights cooling for the day, audio and visual contingents
converged in the high splendor of the Cafe Lucerna, a sensuously
smoky, art nouveau interior that might have been dreamt-up by Gustav
Klimpt on opium, but which was actually the brainchild of President
Vaclav Havel’s grandfather, who commissioned the space in 1911 as
the gastronomical centerpiece of his burgeoning entertainment complex.

Don Letts, renowned musician of Big Audio Dynamite fame and director
of two festival films – George Clinton: Tales of Dr. Funkenstein
and Clash on Broadway – is midway through a DJ set that will dump
the entire contents of the Mothership onto a raunchily appreciative
dance floor. It is here, in this transformed salon-de-la-funk, that
the festival’s lifeblood most vibrantly pulses.

As airline bottles of vodka donated by a sponsor are imbibed
with flagrant DIY spiritus, a spontaneous consensus arises that
our cortexes have been blissfully singed by the radical chic of
Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer- the Future is Unwritten. Aft of the
bar I encounter John Caulkins, Founder and Director of MOFFOM, in a
conversation with Susan Dynner about punk’s legacy. Dynner’s film,
Punk’s Not Dead, is a tightly-woven swan song to the durability of
the punk spirit, sung by a hydra of 81 talking head-thrusters. But
where is Punk now? "Experimenting with new forms," Caulkins says,
"Whether out of revolt, or purely musical intentions, or something
provocatively intimate – that’s where punk is now."

"Did I hear someone ask where punk’s at now?", inquires music
journalist Tom Pryor. "Punk’s standing right behind you," he says,
nodding at Kevin Fitzgerald. "The man had to pinch footage to finish
his film, but when the owners saw the finished product, they granted
him rights to use it because they recognized his achievement."

As Fitzgerald is deservingly feted, conversation segues into
inter-medium appropriation. "Look at About a Son," says Keith Jones,
referring to AJ Schnack’s film about Kurt Cobain’s antecedents. "It
stands on its own as an art film about the despair of growing up in a
kind of post-industrial American bleakness. But because Cobain’s name
and personality are attached to it, it drew a large audience, a fan
base that might not be exposed to that normally. But now that they
have been, maybe they’ll make those connections and take them further."

Jones’ film Durban Poison – co-directed with Michael Lee and Deon
Mass and screening in an out-of-competition section of the festival –
is a documentary testament to the precariousness of such connections.

The filmmakers originally aspired to chronicle the transformation of
the Stable Theatre in Durban, South Africa, from an apartheid-era
locus of creative dissent into a post-apartheid platform for Zulu
nationalism. They planned to document renowned musical dramatist
Mbongeni Ngema (of Sarafina fame) at work on a musical about the
theatre’s history, hoping that, in the process, concentric fields
of metaphors would blossom about the relationship between drama and
historical memory.

But like the history it was chasing, the project’s reality proved ever
elusive as prominent advocates of the theatre were brought down by
political corruption inquiries and a rather funny sex scandal. The
filmmakers then dolefully spun the camera to document their own
frustration at the project’s tragic outlook midway through production,
but the situation spun back, this time as farce with the instant,
unexpected celebrity of director Deon Mass, whose X-Factor-spinoff
reality show had a meteoric spike in popularity.

Giddily parlaying this new cache into leverage on the Stable project,
the filmmakers set upon the theatre with renewed if quixotic vigor.

As the film proceeds towards its denouement, tonal inconsistencies
suggest a waning in directorial unison, but a serenade to street
children on a nocturnal Durban beach belies a flicker of optimism for
the Stable’s – and Africa’s – spiritual future within the shorter-term
eclipse of the project.

Up continent, the attempts of Nigerian singer-activist Femi Kuti to
channel the ferocious rhythms of an even more troubling and corrupt
political situation are chronicled with the hectic and distraught
resilience of its subject in Dan Ollman’s Suffering and Smiling. I’d
heard the music before, and had even seen Kuti play live. But seeing
footage of him struggling to find rhythm for his rage at a president
who had headed the Nigerian military at the time its soldiers threw
his grandmother out a window added a new dimension to both the man
and the music.

The difficulty with using presidents as muses seems a familiar refrain
in the cinema of protest music. Carla Garapedian’s Screamers explores
Californian heavy metal band System of a Down’s outrage at the Turkish
government’s denial of the Armenian genocide. And Barbara Kopple
and Cecilia Peck enthrall Prague audiences with their 2006 Shut Up &
Sing, which follows the Texas-based Dixie Chicks in their fight to
maintain dignity and a country-music fan base while radio networks
ban their music and patriots burn their CDs following their criticism
of George Bush and the Iraq War.

"It’s nice seeing a festival founded by Americans show films like this
in Rumsfeld’s ‘New Europe’", says Hary Jordanov, a Prague resident from
Bulgaria I meet at Lucerna. And while politics is not a deliberate
part of the MOFFOM program, festival-founder Caulkins has lived in
Prague for 15 years and is sensitive to his host city’s perception of
it. "If there is a message, it’s about spreading the music and giving
a wide audience the chance to see good films," Caulkins tells me. His
success at attracting an ever-increasing proportion of corporate
sponsorship makes the festival more sustainable by the year, while
keeping ticket prices charitably low guarantees its accessibility.

On a more personal note, Pavla Fleischer’s film, The Pied Piper of
Hutzovina, which took third place in the competition, accompanies
Ukrainian gypsy singer-songwriter and Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene
Hutz on a search for familial and musical roots in a Gypsy Diaspora
reaching from Carpathia to Siberia. Hutz’s hip-hop and punkish
variations on gypsy idioms are fiercely rejected by a renowned
orthodox Romanista composer, provoking movingly humble reflections on
his musical and spiritual migration. Later, when his genre-bending
innovations are embraced by virtuoso Sascha Kolpachov, Hutz’s idol,
the ensuing ambivalent calm suggests that the natural state of an
emigres identity is one of perpetual flux.

The festival’s one narrative feature to draw big audiences is John
Carney’s aptly-titled Once (which was shown twice, after an initial
sell-out prompted a second screening). A long-shot at Sundance, it took
that festival by storm, and single readers in America might remember
this romantic comedy about busker and Frames-frontman Glen Hansard’s
bittersweet affair with a Czech flower-girl as 2007’s unlikely
midsummer date movie. It was one of the festival’s uber-moments,
when Czech directorial eminences Jizi Menzel, Jan Svenkmayer and Jan
Hrejbek turned up in the same audience to inspect the indie arriviste.

Film festivals have a distorting effect on perception after a few
days. The transformative, alchemical mix of screenings and performances
and parties melts the boundaries between characters while stories
blend and overlap – ‘festival-head’, some call it. The vodka-providing
sponsors are partly to blame for this. Seeing Hansard step into the
Lucerna Cafe after I’d seen both his movie and live performance that
day provoked a prismatic reflection on both man and music.

If his fictionalized character was more neatly-constructed than the
complicated history scorched into his real-life features, his voice
on stage was larger than film. In fact, my ears were still ringing
with the profane and soulful vengeance of that voice, which lent
authority to his persona as the troubled romantic hero of a narrative
feature. The musician and his fictionalized persona seemed symbiotic,
even complimentary, and I found myself imagining the day as a kind
of musical conversation between Hansard and his simulacrum.

Only hours earlier, Frith had described to me a very different
relationship to a version of his real-life ‘character’ frozen in
Nicolas Humbert and Wernaer Penzel’s gorgeous 1990 cinema-verite
masterpiece Step Across the Border. "Every time I saw myself opening
my mouth on screen," Frith explained, "I sort of cringed with
embarrassment. What it told me to do was to learn how to let go of
certain aspects of myself. So in the end, the process of making and
watching the film was like a process of shedding a skin. It allowed
me to get rid of a lot of things. So when I see the film now, I don’t
even see myself. I see this rather peculiar character gallivanting
around the place doing strange things with strange people."

Perhaps it was the advanced festival-head, but I started thinking,
crazily, that it might be good to ban narrative feature films in
South Africa. What if the political corruptibles in Durban Poison,
denied a feature-fix, could have a Frithian shedding experience when
confronted with the cringing realities depicted in the film? It was
just a thought, and happily I kept it to myself, but recalling the
burners of Dixie Chicks CDs, I still think it might be a viable policy
for Texas. Then again, they might be proud of it.

Midway through the festival’s wrap-up party-actually another spirited
throw-down-word spread that Raul de la Fuente’s Nomadak Tx, a doc about
traveling Basque txalaparta musicians, has won the festival’s highest
laurel, the Audience Award. It’s a watershed moment for the organizers,
because the film that viewers have chosen is a formal embodiment of
MOFFOM’s highest principles. The txalaparta, a marimba-resembling
instrument made of sonorous, parallel shafts, is one of the world’s
only instruments played by two people in communication.

The documentary follows two txalaparta virtuosos on their visits to
Shamanic musicians in India, singing herders in the Arctic Lapland,
nomadic Mongolian horsemen, and Bedouins in the Algerian Sahara.

Using music as a lingua franca, the musicians build a new txalaparta
in each destination out of indigenous materials (in the arctic,
ice-blocks are used) and incorporate local musicians and motifs into
the music they record. As the film builds to its crescendo, a visual
montage re-visits steps in their journey while an audio track remixes
the voices and rhythms of these communities separated by history,
language and geography into a conversation that is pure music.

* * *

Prague’s MOFFOM festival takes place each year in late October.