Moscow hosts the 14th Beat Film Festival

Moscow hosts a documentary film festival about the new culture Beat Film Festival. According to the tradition established since the first festival held in 2010, the program is complete without films about music and musicians. Igor Gavrilov found out how today’s documentary filmmakers, the participants of the festival, talk about music.

Two of the brightest works by Russian filmmakers that talk about music at the current Beat Film Festival are Rumble in the Twilight of Moscow directed by Alena Mikhailova and Hunnun Soondan by Mikhail Voropaev. The first of these pictures is an attempt to talk about the phenomenon of Russian industrial music. In the frame are Alexey Tegin, Vladimir Epifantsev, Alexei Borisov, members of the Tobacco Dogs and Reutoff groups, as well as the extremely colorful and, unfortunately, German Vinogradov, who passed away last year. Their faces seem to be cast from the same metal as the objects they used to extract their sounds. At the same time, it does not follow from the film that there was any close-knit industrial scene in Russia, and even more so specialized labels or other creative associations that could survive or not survive to this day and thus give the tape a certain dramatic core. “Roar…” is rather a series of portraits, and the finale is a frivolous and not at all loud song performed by German Vinogradov. And if we consider the entire film as a monument to him alone, then we can assume that the authors have completed their task.

“Hunnun Soondan” is a film-journey with the participation of the Tuvan group “Huun-Khuur-Tu”. She is known to fans of world music and throat singing all over the world, among their admirers were Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp. However, in the film, the musicians travel around their native land and sometimes stop to play and sing. At first glance, this tape is almost a continuous meditation to the lingering sounds of the Huun-Huur-Tu instruments. But quite unexpectedly, stories about Tuva, about the fate of the local sacred lands and about how and why the prisoners built cities on these lands intrude into the fabric of the narrative. In the case of the film about industrial, the fate of the characters did not coincide with the mainstream, and mass recognition did not happen. The worldwide success of Huun-Huur-Tu is a fact, only it remains behind the scenes. But at the same time, both films talk about one thing: how for creators born on one sixth of the land, the process is more important than the result.

If we count hits on the charts and crowds in stadiums as the result, then in the case of the British group The Zombies, about which Robert Schwartzman’s film “The Zombies: Obsessed with a dream” tells, this result came very late, when the living members of the group had long lost all hope of commercial success and engaged in their own projects. In the 1960s, The Zombies wrote songs that connoisseurs put on a par with the hits of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but they had no luck with management. Managers took advantage of the enthusiastic naivety of young musicians and robbed them to the skin. Collecting thousands of stadiums, The Zombies received 10-15 pounds per concert, and when the group broke up, vocalist Colin Blunstone went to work for an insurance company. In 2008, The Zombies decided to throw a series of concerts in honor of the 40th anniversary of their main album “Odessey and Oracle” and actually played it live for the first time. It was then that it became clear that they have a lot of fans. In 2019, The Zombies were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with Radiohead, Roxy Music, Def Leppard and The Cure. Behind the scenes of another musical ceremony with the members of The Zombies, Post Malone and Dave Grohl ask to be photographed, and they themselves still do not seem to fully believe that their dream has come true.

Finally, the most spectacular among films about music was Revival 69: The Return of a Legend, the story of the organization of the second most important open-air festival, which took place in Toronto a month after Woodstock, in September 1969. Conceptually, Toronto Rock and Roll Revival was more precise: festival producer Jon Brower brought together on one stage the fathers of rock and roll, including Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley and Little Richard. But the main event of the festival was the first solo concert of John Lennon. The Beatles member was terribly worried before going on stage, as were his Plastic Ono Band colleagues Eric Clapton and Yoko Ono. However, the group’s set, which included old rock and roll, Lennon’s new songs and Ono’s avant-garde etudes, made such a strong impression on the audience that it became completely clear: Lennon was an independent artist, and The Beatles’ days were numbered.