Flamenco Mi Vida
Aug 21, 2009 Uncategorized
Flamenco Mi Vida
Music runs like a thread through the lives of the filmmaker Peter Sempel: Since 1981, born in Hamburg and on the road in the Australian Outback is already a director and photographer who grew up in music. And it was the raw energy of punk, which also brought him to the film. They made films about Einstürzende Neubauten’s early Toten Hosen, through bands like Birthday Party, DAF Down the UKSubs, Wikitravel, later followed by films about Nina Hagen (Punk & Glory), about Kazuo Ohno, the father of Butoh dance “and Lemmy Kilmister, the head of the legendary heavy band Motörhead. With Flamenco Mi vida Sempel presents his new film, and anyone who believes that the conditioning relatively “normal” issue also a smoother style and a greater accessibility, looks wrong. Some things that change – fortunately – never.
For Flamenco Mi Vida is a blend of documentary and road movie, a collage of music, people and passions which a devil to chronologies and erudite care less, but only his own sense of chaos following you groan, but always fascinating View of a music, a form of living raises, which we think we know everything. This Sempel found on his travels to Andalusia, India and Japan constantly talking to the live Flamenco: El Pele and the dancer Juan Carlos Lérida, Eva Yerbabuena and José Valencia, Soraya Clavijo, Andres Marin and Diego de Morón and Matilde Coral. And many a guest is a real surprise: So you expect Dieter Meier, Swiss multimedia artist musician and founder of Yello Popformation not necessarily in that film. But Meier proves to be a profound knowledge of the matter, as a musical archeologist, puts the lines open.
In general Peter Sempels documentary road movie never falls into the cliches, but it shows the original page of flamenco and its sources and tributaries. So it comes to startling encounters, as when an Indian dancer accompanied by a flamenco dancer on a stage and dance to the joint shows that the movements are in perfect harmony with each other because they have just about the same cultural roots. The connecting links are the Gitanos, the descendants of gypsies, who have their origins in India. You are in a sense, the medium that the music of the old home to Spain and brought it there, mixed with elements of the Arab and Iberian folklore.
Leaves Sempel But it is not a wise lesson in history, his film is more often on the belly than on the head: Chaotic jumps, shortcuts, follow the associative rather than logical principle, whimsical details, which flamenco musicians only show the swinging his feet in rhythm, then the view from the window of a dirty public housing developments play somewhere in Andalusia on a dreary courtyard, where two small boys soccer – those are the images that shape Flamenco Mi Vida. Similarly, the young girl dancing flamenco like a great, and the feeling of passion and longing, profound sadness, everything is wiped from the face of childlike, so that it is almost like a face
Another meeting the weird kind is a sound-image pair, which they also do not necessarily expect: As the background for Einstürzende Neubauten, with its typical sound and a song called “Longing” the appearance of the dancer Andrés Martin – a combination which only at first glance disturbing effect. But over time you get used to Sempels unorthodox way of deconstruction and collage and just be recognized by its unusual relationships that many pictures that we know of flamenco, are nothing but mystification, which have nothing to do with real life too.
Again and again during the film’s protestations, which gave the film its title of “Flamenco es mi vida – Flamenco is my life.” What at first sounds like an empty phrase that will safely dahergesagt gets in this work and by the power and passion of the protagonists but a momentum and credibility that impressed. And that’s so one can assume Sempel Peter wanted to achieve with his film. He has done it.
(Joachim Kurz)
Title: Flamenco Mi Vida Country of production: Germany Year of production: 2007 Length: 92 (Min) of material: déjà vu
Leave a Reply