Halber Mensch [1/2 Mensch / Half Man] (1986) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Documentary-cum-music video of the now-legendary cult band Einstuerzende Neubaten's 1986 tour of Japan. Caters more than it informs, unfortunately.
The single most repeated story about Einstuerzende Neubauten, the underground band from Germany who beat on sheet metal and shopping carts to create mutant rock music, is the one about the time they caved in the ceiling of a venue they were playing in. Not by playing too loud, although they were certainly capable of it: they'd used a buzzsaw to cut through the support pillars. The buzzsaw was a staple part of their act. They'd mike it up and use it as an instrument. During one show they used a jackhammer to drill a hole in the rear wall and made their escape that way. This is clearly not a group you want playing your prom, unless you want to assume the clean-up fee.
HALBER MENSCH, directed by the fitfully brilliant Japanese filmmaker Sogo Ishii, is an attempt to weld documentary-style footage with blatantly calculated music-video images. It's marketed (by Atavistic Video) more or less as a music video product: the track names are indexed on the sleeve, and Atavistic is primarily a record company. As a documentary, though, it works in a fairly unorthodox way.
Einstuerzende Neubauten (the name means, to be entirely literal about it, "collapsing buildings from the newer school of architecture") is as unorthodox a band as there probably could be. There are some conventional instruments -- guitar and bass -- but the majority of the sound of the band is made up of metal and plastic objects that are smashed, rubbed, beaten, stroked, and sampled in various ways. The band's live performance, if the above example is any kind of clue, is an experience in itself. HALBER MENSCH does not seem as interested in recreating the experience as it is in using the band's performance as a kind of visual fetish.
The band is not introduced formally at first: they are simply dropped into our laps, playing the droning, eerie "Armenia". The lead singer, Blixa Bargeld, is a scrawny, bug-eyed fellow who seems to have to gather on strength from every sector in his body to howl out the haunting lyrics: "Please let me know... / Are the volcanoes active again?" The lyrics are in German and are not titled, except once briefly in Japanese, and not having them is a big minus to people who don't know the band, since the music, as visceral as it is, also works because of its poetic and angry lyrics.
When we are formally introduced to the band, they don't speak for themselves: we see them in single shots, or walking in a looming landscape, with title cards that explain who they are. Their custom instruments are given similar treatments. The net result feels less like a good documentary and more like a handholding exercise: we're not permitted to really discover the band on our own.
The film works best when it meshes the band's pummeling music to equally powerful visuals. The high point is the song "Z.N.S." (Central Nervous System), which features a crew of Sankai Juku-esque dancers and a good deal of hyperkinetic editing. When we finally get to see the band performing for a real audience, instead of the camera (the filmmaking is so matter-of-fact about the fact that the earlier scenes are such setups that we are allowed to see the camera tracks and the crew), it's almost anticlimactic.
The documentary end of the movie fails in other ways. When we get to see the band setting up, for instance, it's all done in bewildering closeups and snippets of people taping this and miking that. There's no sense of a process, of *how* the work is being done. It's like those movies where they show a character who's allegedly a writer and all we see is him crumpling up one piece of paper after another and throwing them away. How do these people come up with their music? What's their creative process like? Hell, we can't even get a clear idea of how they put their stage act together!
As weak as HALBER MENSCH is as a documentary, it works best as a piece of propulsive eyecandy for people who know the band, or are being introduced to them through another means. Just don't go into it expecting to learn something substantive about one of the few bands on the face of the earth that could use a good documentary.
Two and a half out of four I-beams.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth =smilin' in your face, all the time wanna take your place, the BACKSTABBERS=
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