Sounds January '73
Can - A music film by Peter Przygodda
On 4 February 1972 the German rock group Can held a free concert in the Cologne sports hall. 10,000 people attended, the largest number of listeners that a German rock group has ever experienced. One can see: Audience and musicians hugging each other, dancing or jumping for joy, jugglers with apples, knives and plates, circus performers, a juggler in a black tuxedo catching colourful umbrellas, then leaving the stage on which just the last notes of the concert have faded away, which was as unusual as these scenes are unusual for pop concerts. At the same time, Can provided the German scene with a cinematic document of this concert, which has many advantages over some foreign productions. These 70 minutes of 16 mm colour film, directed by the Munich-based Peter Przygodda, bring the music of the Can closer to the audience, make it more manageable than a single concert, make many things easier to understand through the complex presentation of the process of creating this music from the studio to the stage and vice versa. This is certainly partly due to the fact that Peter Przygodda and Can have known each other long and well, and that each of them has set to work with the firm intention of using his medium to create the maximum counterpart to that of the other. But above all it is due to the realization that it is perhaps, if at all, only possible to illustrate this process of creation on film by working, as here, visually on two levels, the concert and the studio, acoustically on only one, the sound recording of the concert, which runs through the film as a central theme. Acoustically, both levels merge into one another when the picture is dazzled from the studio to the stage, the sound thus shows considerable differences in quality.
Someone messed up while shooting, says bassist Holger Czukay, someone didn't pay attention and thus made the original sound unusable. That's why they had to rely on this asynchronous, bad control tape of the Can, which is running at every concert. The film shows how the Can produce a perfect studio sound in their own recording studio from the lousy live sound they rework, mix and cut. While the camera at the concert is completely focused on documentation, with pure, long, calm, mostly rigid shots, stage wide shots or informative close-ups of the musicians, and captures the hectic and tension of the concert, the pictures in the recording studio are more experimental and playful: Often oversized close-ups and detail shots, concentrated, intimate, sometimes almost unreal due to the exposure and subsequent blurring. Peter Przygodda's picture montage, with interspersed inserts and illustrations, is perfect, fluid and rhythmic, just like the sound montage of the Can, but some pictures could stand longer or should not reappear as fillers later. Sensitive observations, which flow in softly and unobtrusively - the drumming of the boy is included in the arrangement of the music, singer Damo, on stage singing wildly and ecstatically, calmly, gently, almost whispering - involve the audience in the working process of the five musicians, their ideas and the communication, which apart from a few fragments of conversation takes place exclusively in the music.
Ingeborg Schober
No independent music film has been made in this country for a long time. We all know what music films look like that are initiated as television productions by promotion representatives of record companies. The Can and Peter Przygodda put money, a lot of time and energy together to make something consistently together. So the film that was made in this way is a direct continuation of the films we made when there was no pop business here. Films that were not primarily made as advertisements to sell records, but out of direct love for the music that was being covered. With the idea of not pushing oneself into the foreground with the images, but to develop a montage that corresponds to the structure of the music, in order to transpose the flow of the music. Peter Przygodda's film is based on this togetherness and cooperation, which is why he has found a stylistic principle for his film that corresponds completely to the music of the Can: authenticity.
During post-production in the Can's sound studio, Damo is recorded in close-up for a vocal part without prior rehearsal. Damo rhythmically sings "I am too leise" over and over again, because he can't hear himself, he is not enough amplified. It takes an incredibly long time until Holger notices this and pulls him up. This process has been captured in sound and vision: In the beginning you hear all instruments, except Damo, who is in the picture, until suddenly his voice comes in. Now they continue working on it. Damo plays his voice once more without a picture. In the film we see Damo at the beginning of this piece, clearly asynchronous, until suddenly the synchronous voice of the first recording is added, above which the playback as a second voice then appears. This is how the piece "I am too leise" came into being.
This is the Can's love of authenticity, their sincerity towards the given means and circumstances. And this is exactly what you can find in many small details in Peter Przygodda's film.
Rüdiger Nüchtern