Berlin Calling / Techno Narratives

with no small amount of apprehension walking into the theater to see this, but turned out to be not annoying at all, and a pretty decent flick. for those who dont know, my own synopsis:

years of drugs and intense touring schedule catches up with successful techno guy, who after a particularly bad pill starts having psychotic/schizophrenic (film's terms) episodes -- and they get worse over a period of time. there is the trashing of the label office, a myriad of irresponsible, ego driven asshole behavior, mental institution/rehab, more drugs, losing girlfriend --- won't spoil the end here.

pretty enjoyable -- but what i want to ask is this:

(concerning emotionally engaging feature dramas) what other kind of film/narrative is possible about Techno? (german or otherwise)

the plot not only seems like the quintessential, but indeed the only kind of story that can be told about this music scene.

with a rock film for instance (taking place a few decades ago), you have a list of themes to choose from: politics, rebellion, philosophy, poetry, theater, literature, history, the cult of personality, media, rival ideological agendas, etc.

but with techno, what the hell can you make a techno drama about other than drugs and losing your mind???

i mean the only thing this music and related scene is about is Escape through aural physicality. as many have posited before, one listens to this music and go clubbing for raw sensation, and to repress emotions. there is no message, no personality, no humanity at the center -- only raw sensation and a hedonistic black hole.

and the only story arc possible is one of life involuntarily, forcefully, perhaps even violently, inevitably, returning to confront the subject and slap him in the face. welcome to the desert of the real...

(have not seen dubstep drama at all -- what those about? worth seeing or no?)

john eden said:

it depends on what you mean by techno tho.

Certainly it would be interesting to see a film based around Teknivals

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do "techno" really mean drastically different things to different people? to me it means Jeff Mills, Tressor, MNML, and everything in between.

you mean a documentary about techno festivals? that might or might not be interesting but it's not the "emotionally engaging dramatic fiction" that i'm talking about.

really, can anyone come up with another story arc about techno that can be human and engaging for a duration of 1.5 hours????

the dj/producer... plays lots of gigs and... fists pump air and... what?

john eden said:

But I am surprised at you Zhao! Surely the whole point about music is the social context and community around it, not just the notes or performance.

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those are certainly some good ideas.

(note: not making a value judgement with any of this, rock narratives may not be preferable to the non-linear "eternal present" of techno at all)

to me the narrative potential of techno culture is reduced from previous eras, precisely because there is a relative lack of the social/political dimension: isolation is a both a popular theme in the music as well as actual experience of it. sure people go off to festivals in vans, and there is social interaction SURROUNDING the music, but if you go to any club for instance, a social dimension is completely lacking: each person is completely alone and isolated from eachother. in fact this isolation is so pronounced that i'm surprised that articulations of it are not more common.

probably way too much a generalization maybe. but i don't know how else to articulate this something which is very real to me.

good ideas Padraig.

i suppose my post was more about a particular, maybe Berlin, Techno culture. and a narrow idea of Techno in general.

john eden said:

I dunno about that isolationism on the dancefloor thing either, I mean people surely interact with each other, flash each other smiles at "those" moments, try to talk over the din, kiss?

If you look at the texts by people like tech:net in the mid 90s they were suggesting the dancefloor as a space where humans become some kind of collective entity - the third mind - not just a series of atomised individuals...

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yes you are right... human interaction just shifts and changes, and can never be cut out of the equation. and the collective entity thing is great... i've actually thought along same lines before, during a time when i was much more enthralled with rave theology, and much less critical of it...

padraig (u.s.) said:

-on a similar tip I think a very "human" film could definitely be made about something the like the Detroit Riots of 1967 using Moodymann for the soundtrack

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don't know why i've never listened to much Moodyman, and the more i do the more criminal it seems. shit is really really good... detroit 67 is on right now.