This is exceptional documentary film-making, about one of the most important and horrible events in modern history. Like Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old it is our direct line to what Doctor Who would presumably call a “fixed point in time”.
How poignant, harrowing and borderline unbelievable their stories are.
The lost tapes 2 review archive#
I could talk about its deliberate quieting of the authorial voice, with all the audio taken either from the archive or from eyewitnesses who are still alive. I could talk about what an excellent companion it makes to Sky’s landmark drama Chernobyl, from a few years back – highlighting the truth and the fiction, deepening our understanding. I could have written about why this is such a good documentary, about its impeccable journalistic credentials, astonishing access to previously unseen sources and beautiful framing. A review that would still work as an honest assessment of the film if read in 2072, just as hopefully it would in 2022.
This review could have done the same thing. It is, and will remain, a very good documentary about the Chernobyl disaster. If that’s all it ever is, then it will still have been worth the effort. Watch this in ten years’ time, fifty years time, a hundred years time, and it will remain a very good documentary about the Chernobyl disaster. James Jones’s documentary, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes will still exist in years to come, divorced of the date on which it was first released. Julian Cope said Can “sounds only like itself, like no-one before or after”, and we can’t think of a better way to describe The Lost Tapes.Time never stops flowing, but film? Film is fixed. Throughout, Can sound by turns tender and soothing, hypnotic and inexorable, straightforwardly rocking and atonally abstract, playful and intense. Often there’s a sense of either imminent arrival or recent departure: Desert is closely related to Soul Desert (from 1970’s Soundtracks) and A Swan is Born either prefaces or postscripts Sing Swan Song (from 1972’s Ege Bamyasi), for example. In the case of the earliest recordings, Mooney’s often-improvised vocals have an unhinged intensity ( Waiting for the Streetcar finds him ranting “are you waiting for the streetcar?” until the words lose all meaning), while Suzuki’s later contributions are gentler, if no less distinctive. Can always sounded like an advance party, an exploratory force reporting back from the blasted fringes of pop music – and the sense of striving, of constantly seeking to take flight inhabits the majority of these 30 pieces.Īll of the elements that made Can such a compelling proposition are in place: the relentless, periodically mesmerising repetition driven by Liebezeit’s unshakeable, funky drumming, the angular guitar and keyboard contributions, and an overwhelming sense of a microwave-style power-without-discernible-heat. It’s the quality and validity of the music on The Lost Tapes that makes this box-set so much more than a barrel-scraping exercise.
The lost tapes 2 review movie#
The majority of The Lost Tapes covers the period just prior to the 1969 release of the band’s debut Monster Movie to Suzuki’s departure just after 1973’s Future Days went on sale. Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli and fellow Stockhausen alumni Holger Czukay contributed drums, guitar and bass respectively, and the band invited American sculptor and poet Malcolm Mooney to provide vocals.īy 1970, though, his psychiatrist more-or-less insisted Mooney leave the band in an effort to protect his fragile mental health – undaunted, the musicians selected Damo Suzuki, a Japanese singer they encountered busking on the streets of Munich, as Mooney’s replacement.
0 kommentar(er)
