Prague’s Cinematic Jukebox

The turning leaves weren’t the only autumnal attraction back in Prague this October. For its fourth year, the MOFFOM festival – short for Music on Film, Film on Music – unspooled in a kaleidoscopic gaze at our musical past and present. Over 60 filmmakers and musicians from 21 countries made their way along with 10,000 viewers to Prague’s Kino Lucerna, Europe’s oldest, and arguably most beautiful, cinema complex.

As a niche festival centering on the infinitely-variable genre of the music film, MOFFOM combines ardent affection for both mediums with a belief that bringing the two together will produce a transcendent sensory experience. “The films have a smaller audience than narrative features do,” MOFFOM Program Director Keith Jones told me, “But they have enormous power, both to entertain and to inform, because they’re truthful and honest and based in reality.”

They also offer rarefied glimpses at musical contexts unknown outside musicological circles. It was like stepping into Aladdin’s lamp, complete with surround-sound. And by lacing an ambitious five-day schedule of celluloid séances with shin-digs and live performances, the festival format seemed to pay homage to Prague’s century-spanning alchemical traditions while enticing participants to ponder the interrelationship between sound and screen.

“Seeing a piece of visual art can really change the way I perceive reality and my place in reality,” says multi-instrumentalist and composer Fred Frith, whose musical and cinema compositions are the subject of this year’s MOFFOM retrospective. “I think hearing something can do that, too. And in some ways, hearing reaches places that visual things cannot reach.”

While music in fiction film usually punctuates or underscores the emotional resonance of stories, many of the documentary films on view reversed this relationship. In screening after screening, music was the story: alongside punk, funk, jazz, reggae and avant classical performers, there were also Iranian santour, Belgian chanson, Russian underground, tango, jazz, samba, nomadic, country and fado musicians. It was almost too much to see, too much to hear, were it not for the genre’s ability to root the grooves and leitmotifs in communities beyond earshot.

My first eye-opener was the role a mansion in the New York Berkshires played in mapping and expanding the history of America’s native art form, jazz. Legendary indie–producer Ben Barenholtz (Barton Fink Requiem for a Dream) presented his directorial debut film, Music Inn, which chronicles the evolution of a 1950’s summer hideaway for musicians into the first “school for jazz” and the context of legendary collaborations. Roundtable discussions led by musicological sages Alan Lomax and Marshall Stearns united so many pioneering virtuosos that it would be easier to cite the ranks of canonical jazz masters who did not attend. What emerges is a gripping portrait of a milieu converging upon its own history, and in so doing finding the confidence to riff its way through an ever-widening legacy.

One branch of that improvisational heritage is freestyle hip-hop, which director Kevin Fitzgerald tracks with his grainy, flava-laden documentary Freestyle: Tthe Art of Rhyme. Taking the lacerated, street-level texture of hip-hop mix tapes as an aesthetic mandate, Fitzgerald weaves a battle-cycle between reigning rhyme-slinger Supernatural and contender Craig G. into a polyphonic tableau of this combative urban sub-culture and its precarious lyricism.

With projector lights cooling for the day, audio and visual contingents converged in the high splendor of the Café Lucerna, a sensuously smoky, art nouveau interior that might have been dreamt-up by Gustav Klimpt on opium, but which was actually the brainchild of President Vaclav Havel’s grandfather, who commissioned the space in 1911 as the gastronomical centerpiece of his burgeoning entertainment complex.

Don Letts, renowned musician of Big Audio Dynamite fame and director of two festival films – George Clinton: Tales of Dr. Funkenstein and Clash on Broadway – is midway through a DJ set that will dump the entire contents of the Mothership onto a raunchily appreciative dance floor. It is here, in this transformed salon-de-la-funk, that the festival’s lifeblood most vibrantly pulses.

As airline bottles of vodka donated by a sponsor are imbibed with flagrant DIY spiritus, a spontaneous consensus arises that our cortexes have been blissfully singed by the radical chic of Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer- the Future is Unwritten. Aft of the bar I encounter John Caulkins, Founder and Director of MOFFOM, in a conversation with Susan Dynner about punk’s legacy. Dynner’s film, Punk’s Not Dead, is a tightly-woven swan song to the durability of the punk spirit, sung by a hydra of 81 talking head-thrusters. But where is Punk now? “Experimenting with new forms,” Caulkins says, “Whether out of revolt, or purely musical intentions, or something provocatively intimate – that’s where punk is now.”

“Did I hear someone ask where punk’s at now?”, inquires music journalist Tom Pryor. “Punk’s standing right behind you,” he says, nodding at Kevin Fitzgerald. “The man had to pinch footage to finish his film, but when the owners saw the finished product, they granted him rights to use it because they recognized his achievement.”

As Fitzgerald is deservingly feted, conversation segues into inter-medium appropriation. “Look at About a Son,” says Keith Jones, referring to AJ Schnack’s film about Kurt Cobain’s antecedents. “It stands on its own as an art film about the despair of growing up in a kind of post-industrial American bleakness. But because Cobain’s name and personality are attached to it, it drew a large audience, a fan base that might not be exposed to that normally. But now that they have been, maybe they’ll make those connections and take them further.”

Jones’ film Durban Poison – co-directed with Michael Lee and Deon Mass and screening in an out-of-competition section of the festival – is a documentary testament to the precariousness of such connections. The filmmakers originally aspired to chronicle the transformation of the Stable Theatre in Durban, South Africa, from an apartheid-era locus of creative dissent into a post-apartheid platform for Zulu nationalism. They planned to document renowned musical dramatist Mbongeni Ngema (of Sarafina fame) at work on a musical about the theatre’s history, hoping that, in the process, concentric fields of metaphors would blossom about the relationship between drama and historical memory.

But like the history it was chasing, the project’s reality proved ever elusive as prominent advocates of the theatre were brought down by political corruption inquiries and a rather funny sex scandal. The filmmakers then dolefully spun the camera to document their own frustration at the project’s tragic outlook midway through production, but the situation spun back, this time as farce with the instant, unexpected celebrity of director Deon Mass, whose X-Factor-spinoff reality show had a meteoric spike in popularity.

Giddily parlaying this new cache into leverage on the Stable project, the filmmakers set upon the theatre with renewed if quixotic vigor. As the film proceeds towards its dénouement, tonal inconsistencies suggest a waning in directorial unison, but a serenade to street children on a nocturnal Durban beach belies a flicker of optimism for the Stable’s – and Africa’s – spiritual future within the shorter-term eclipse of the project.

Up continent, the attempts of Nigerian singer-activist Femi Kuti to channel the ferocious rhythms of an even more troubling and corrupt political situation are chronicled with the hectic and distraught resilience of its subject in Dan Ollman’s Suffering and Smiling. I’d heard the music before, and had even seen Kuti play live. But seeing footage of him struggling to find rhythm for his rage at a president who had headed the Nigerian military at the time its soldiers threw his grandmother out a window added a new dimension to both the man and the music.

The difficulty with using presidents as muses seems a familiar refrain in the cinema of protest music. Carla Garapedian’s Screamers explores Californian heavy metal band System of a Down’s outrage at the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian genocide. And Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck enthrall Prague audiences with their 2006 Shut Up & Sing, which follows the Texas-based Dixie Chicks in their fight to maintain dignity and a country-music fan base while radio networks ban their music and patriots burn their CDs following their criticism of George Bush and the Iraq War.

“It’s nice seeing a festival founded by Americans show films like this in Rumsfeld’s ‘New Europe'”, says Hary Jordanov, a Prague resident from Bulgaria I meet at Lucerna. And while politics is not a deliberate part of the MOFFOM program, festival-founder Caulkins has lived in Prague for 15 years and is sensitive to his host city’s perception of it. “If there is a message, it’s about spreading the music and giving a wide audience the chance to see good films,” Caulkins tells me. His success at attracting an ever-increasing proportion of corporate sponsorship makes the festival more sustainable by the year, while keeping ticket prices charitably low guarantees its accessibility.

On a more personal note, Pavla Fleischer’s film, The Pied Piper of Hutzovina, which took third place in the competition, accompanies Ukrainian gypsy singer-songwriter and Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz on a search for familial and musical roots in a Gypsy Diaspora reaching from Carpathia to Siberia. Hutz’s hip-hop and punkish variations on gypsy idioms are fiercely rejected by a renowned orthodox Romanista composer, provoking movingly humble reflections on his musical and spiritual migration. Later, when his genre-bending innovations are embraced by virtuoso Sascha Kolpachov, Hutz’s idol, the ensuing ambivalent calm suggests that the natural state of an émigrés identity is one of perpetual flux.

The festival’s one narrative feature to draw big audiences is John Carney’s aptly-titled Once (which was shown twice, after an initial sell-out prompted a second screening). A long-shot at Sundance, it took that festival by storm, and single readers in America might remember this romantic comedy about busker and Frames-frontman Glen Hansard’s bittersweet affair with a Czech flower-girl as 2007’s unlikely midsummer date movie. It was one of the festival’s uber-moments, when Czech directorial eminences Jizi Menzel, Jan Svenkmayer and Jan Hrejbek turned up in the same audience to inspect the indie arriviste.

Film festivals have a distorting effect on perception after a few days. The transformative, alchemical mix of screenings and performances and parties melts the boundaries between characters while stories blend and overlap – ‘festival-head’, some call it. The vodka-providing sponsors are partly to blame for this. Seeing Hansard step into the Lucerna Café after I’d seen both his movie and live performance that day provoked a prismatic reflection on both man and music.

If his fictionalized character was more neatly-constructed than the complicated history scorched into his real-life features, his voice on stage was larger than film. In fact, my ears were still ringing with the profane and soulful vengeance of that voice, which lent authority to his persona as the troubled romantic hero of a narrative feature. The musician and his fictionalized persona seemed symbiotic, even complimentary, and I found myself imagining the day as a kind of musical conversation between Hansard and his simulacrum.

Only hours earlier, Frith had described to me a very different relationship to a version of his real-life ‘character’ frozen in Nicolas Humbert and Wernaer Penzel’s gorgeous 1990 cinema-vérité masterpiece Step Across the Border. “Every time I saw myself opening my mouth on screen,” Frith explained, “I sort of cringed with embarrassment. What it told me to do was to learn how to let go of certain aspects of myself. So in the end, the process of making and watching the film was like a process of shedding a skin. It allowed me to get rid of a lot of things. So when I see the film now, I don’t even see myself. I see this rather peculiar character gallivanting around the place doing strange things with strange people.”

Perhaps it was the advanced festival-head, but I started thinking, crazily, that it might be good to ban narrative feature films in South Africa. What if the political corruptibles in Durban Poison, denied a feature-fix, could have a Frithian shedding experience when confronted with the cringing realities depicted in the film? It was just a thought, and happily I kept it to myself, but recalling the burners of Dixie Chicks CDs, I still think it might be a viable policy for Texas. Then again, they might be proud of it.

Midway through the festival’s wrap-up party — actually another spirited throw-down — word spread that Raul de la Fuente’s Nömadak Tx, a doc about traveling Basque txalaparta musicians, has won the festival’s highest laurel, the Audience Award. It’s a watershed moment for the organizers, because the film that viewers have chosen is a formal embodiment of MOFFOM’s highest principles. The txalaparta, a marimba-resembling instrument made of sonorous, parallel shafts, is one of the world’s only instruments played by two people in communication.

The documentary follows two txalaparta virtuosos on their visits to Shamanic musicians in India, singing herders in the Arctic Lapland, nomadic Mongolian horsemen, and Bedouins in the Algerian Sahara. Using music as a lingua franca, the musicians build a new txalaparta in each destination out of indigenous materials (in the arctic, ice-blocks are used) and incorporate local musicians and motifs into the music they record. As the film builds to its crescendo, a visual montage re-visits steps in their journey while an audio track remixes the voices and rhythms of these communities separated by history, language and geography into a conversation that is pure music.

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Prague’s MOFFOM festival takes place each year in late October. Information is available at

MOFFOM.cz.

Jonathan Gainer is a screenwriter and dramaturgical consultant in Berlin, where he’s lived for the past 12 years. His first movie, a multi-plot fiction feature set in Dubai, is scheduled for production this February.