Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback
Country of production Germany , United States , Spain
original language German , English
Publishing year 2006
length 100 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Dietmar Post ,
Lucía Palacios
script Dietmar Post,
Lucía Palacios
production Dietmar Post,
Lucía Palacios
music Silver Monk Time
camera Dietmar Post,
Lucía Palacios
cut Dieter Jaufmann,
Karl-W. Huelsenbeck
occupation

Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback is a documentary by the directors and producers Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios , shot between 1997 and 2002 in the United States and Germany . In 2008 the two filmmakers were awarded the renowned Adolf Grimme Prize after many other awards . The film was released on DVD in 2009.

content

The music documentary is about the legendary, style-defining beat band The Monks , about which “ Rolling Stone ” wrote: “To this day, there is nothing in art, rock, punk or groove rock that comes from the crazy conceptual rigor of Images of the Monks and the raw, avant beer garden sound of the only LP by the group Black Monk Time comes close. "

In the mid-1960s, there was a unique German-American cultural exchange in the Federal Republic of Germany: five American ex-soldiers living there who had founded a beat band during their military service met two German artists and beat fans. Together they devised a band concept that broke with the popular image of the beat: The Monks cut their hair short, shaved their tonsils, and instead of ties wore gallows ropes around their necks. Their music was minimalist and aggressive, their lyrics ironic and radical, their aesthetics provocative and Dadaist . The special situation between Adenauer politics and the Vietnam War , American pop and growing West German counterculture manifested itself in the radical anti-war songs of the Monks and the idiosyncratic mélange of Anglo-American pop and German avant-garde.

Today the Monks are pioneers of various modern musical trends; Bands like Faust , Can , Amon Düül or Kraftwerk as well as various protagonists of punk can be seen as their direct descendants. The film was reconstructed from the personal memories of the five musicians and extensive archive material.

Reviews

“This story begins in Gelnhausen, on the edge of the zone, in the middle of the Cold War. It doesn't start in Krautrock and Kraftwerk's Düsseldorf. But it leads right there. Because monks - the transatlantic feedback does nothing less than an in-depth ethnography of the sixties, a portrait of breaking relationships with a sky full of timpani and guitars. Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios use the monks  - this small, big band - to tell of the storming and pressing of an era. The two filmmakers worked on her portrait for almost ten years. In other words: this story was as good and great as its funding has repeatedly proven precarious.

Not that this alone is worth the award. It's not just the small thing about this film, the absurd, that monks - the transatlantic feedback made it so big. Not just the subcultural capital, this cool knowledge of a footnote in pop history. Rather, it is the nonchalant talent of turning the individual narrative of five GIs stranded in Germany and their short excursion into the hinterland of the hit parades into a parable for the emancipatory energy of an era. "

In the justification of the jury for the Adolf-Grimme Prize 2008 it goes on: “Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios made them swing again. In a documentary that, unlike the great utopian noise of the monks , also knows about the nuances. "

The New York critic and John Cage expert Richard Kostelanetz compares Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback with the epoch-making film "Comedian Harmonists" (1976) by Eberhard Fechner .

Comeback, first appearance in 40 years

In connection with the film, a play loud! initiated double CD soundtrack album entitled Silver Monk Time  - A Tribute to the Monks. This album served to further finance the film and was officially presented in October 2006 at the Volksbühne in Berlin . At this presentation, the film was shown to a large audience in Germany for the first time. Afterwards, at the invitation of play loud! productions the Monks for the first time in almost 40 years to the frenetic cheers of a totally overcrowded Volksbühne again live in Germany. There have been guest appearances by musicians who are featured on Silver Monk Time. Mark E. Smith (The Fall), The Raincoats , Schorsch Kamerun (Goldene Zitronen) and Peter Hein (Fehlfarben) celebrated their comeback together with the Monks. The audience also included some of the Monks' former companions, including creative manager Walther Niemann, tour manager Wolfgang Gluszczewski and Polydor producer Jimmy Bowien.

Five of the film's protagonists have died since filming was completed in 2002: 2004 Roger Johnston, the Monks' drummer, 2005 Charles Wilp , who tried to win over the Monks for his groundbreaking Afri-Cola advertising campaign, 2008 Dave Day Havlicek, the Banjo player of the Monks, in 2009 the tour manager Wolfgang Gluszczewski and also in 2009 the inventor and creative manager of the Monks, Walther Niemann.

The motif for the film poster was drawn by the German painter Daniel Richter .

Awards

  • 2006: Leeds Film Festival (Audience Favorite)
  • 2006: Hessian Film Award (nomination for best documentary film)
  • 2007: San Francisco Berlin & Beyond Festival (2nd Audience Award)
  • 2007: Würzburger Filmtage (audience award for best documentary film)
  • 2007: Milan Doc Festival (best editing)
  • 2008: Adolf Grimme Prize 2008 (direction and script)

DVD release

Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback was officially released on DVD on March 13, 2009.

DE: BUG Magazin (April 2009) writes about the film DVD and the new CD releases: “Apart from an entertaining Monks package and the exclamation mark behind the importance of this band, Post and Palacios have managed to make a very impressive music film here that is strictly itself holds on to contemporary witnesses in order to avoid gossip that neither glorifies nor exposes, that makes available in a row and that differs from stupid retro or chart shows in its clarity and openness just as the Monks once did from the Monkees. "

Republication

Due to the success of Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback , the LP Black Monk Time was re-released together with the DVD. This is only the third official release of the album after 1966 and 1979. Play loud! Productions and Polydor have also re-released the single complication / oh, how to do now in the original cover, which was "designed" in 1966 by the artist and manager of the Monks, Walther Niemann, for the first time.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Monks - The Transatlantic Feedback . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2007 (PDF; test number: 111 500 K).
  2. ↑ a b Complete justification from the Grimme Institute ( memento of the original from May 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.grimme-institut.de
  3. ↑ "The theme is that guys who look interchangeable at the beginning of the film become individuals by its end. [...] The retrospective structure of Comedian Harmonists influenced not only a flaccid extended documentary about the Mamas & the Papas broadcast frequently over public television (the title of which I can't remember), but also a more remarkable film portrait I saw recently, Also at Goethe House, but thankfully in English, about several American military veterans who in the early 1960s formed in Germany a short-lived proto-punk rock group calling themselves the Monks (and cutting their hair appropriately). Made by Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios with support from not American but German television, monks - the transatlantic feedback (2006) recalls, likewise through individual interviews decades later, how they came together and fell apart, and the remarkable performances they did in between. “ Richard Kostelanetz's full article on rock documentaries