Beyond Ultraviolence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow
The Japanese noise sculptor Merzbow is one of the most respected figures in contemporary avant-garde music, but you wouldn’t know it from watching this pretentious and thoroughly unpleasant documentary. Adhering to the frustrating tenets of “open form” docs, director Ian Kerkhof offers little in the way of biographical or contextual information about his subject. Instead, Beyond Ultraviolence consists of Merzbow free-associating about the comforts of noise while the filmmaker tries out a predictable assortment of lenses and filters, zooms and pans, and razzle-dazzle editing tricks–all of which obscure the footage and make the popularity of Merzbow’s CDs and performances all the more confounding. Granted, some of the artist’s ruminations are intriguing. But when the film suddenly strays into a stomach-turning 20-minute presentation of his obsession with bondage porn and “suicide videos,” the lack of connective tissue becomes downright infuriating. Surely Kerkhof intends to recreate the disconcerting, assaultive effect of his subject’s art. But the approach is bafflingly lazy (why all those long takes of Tokyo streets shot from a moving vehicle?)–and bad journalism to boot. (Noel Murray)
this review originally appeared on city pages.com, based in minneapolis
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