Until the Light Takes Us, directed by Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites
Back in the days of the Roman Empire, the saying went:
Every Goth wants to be a Roman. And why not? Being a Goth meant being a
poor migrant who arrived at the gate of the empire with Huns on his heels;
he had to beg for protection in exchange for dirty work 行 he was an
"outsider," in other words. But the black metal musicians in Audrey Ewell
and Aaron Aites' documentary Until the Light Takes Us are not descendants of the Germanic volker who settled among the Mediterraneans and went on to
become the fabric of Europa. These
are the people who stayed put and built stable societies in their snowy little
hamlets. The empires 行 the Christians, the Danes, the Swedes, the Brits,
the Nazis, then MacDonald's 行 came to them.
Until the Light is not so much about the music, but about black metal
culture in Norway, its proponents and their ideas, and how their ethos got
co-opted by the mainstream. The film introduces us to two characters from
the germinating period of the scene in the early '90s. Varg "Count
Grischnackh" Vikernes of one-man band Burzum is serving 21 years (the
maximum term in Norway) in prison. The other, Darkthorne drummer/lyricist
Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell, continues to record and to perform. He explains how
his path diverged from Virkenes': while the latter "went more and more into
politics," he himself dug deeper into music.
Black metal was from the beginning full of
violence. The musicians embraced a theater of the macabre, not only posing
with huge knives but also cutting themselves onstage. Per Yngve "Dead"
Ohlin of Mayhem, credited by his fellow musicians as being the first on the
scene to wear corpse paint, committed a particularly messy shotgun suicide
行 to be photographed by his bandmate for the cover art of their next
record. There's also attendant bigotry: Drummer Bård G. "Faust" Eithun of
Emperor served time for murdering a gay man, to the mild approval of his
former bandmate 行 and the film doesn't even touch the alleged white
supremacist views of Vikernes.
All this death and destruction culminated in
a series of church burnings in '92-'93 and the murder of Øystein "Euronymous"
Aareseth (the one who snapped the picture of the dead Dead). Vikernes,
sharp and articulate, sums up what he thought were the social ills that
fueled black metal and explains how, in the early days of Christianity in
Norway, churches were deliberately built to desecrate the native pagan holy
sites. So he joined other kids setting fire to these UNESCO treasures, and
claimed responsibility for the burnings. The arsons, labeled by the media
as acts of Satanism, along with Vikernes' murder of Aareseth (he argues
self-defense), put him behind bars and black metal on the world media map.
Even in a country where atheists are the majority, the cartoon image stuck
行 because Christianity is a habit, even when it's not a religion.
Yet a third black metal musician,
Satyricon's Kjetil "Frost" Haraldstad, allows himself to be exploited by a
painter who appropriates the movement's most obvious symbols for his
canvases. You know it's bad when even the "arts sector" sees money in it:
black metal has become a Norwegian cultural signifier. There is a pathetic
sadness when the camera follows Haraldstad on board the plane to be a
performance-art attraction in an Italian art gallery: ill at ease and
"lost," as the painter puts it.
Says Nagell, "Black metal is now everyone's
property...it's out of our fucking hands." He may not be so articulate 行
when he is interviewed for a German magazine, he's full of the braggadocio
and clichés you'd expect from a youngish man in black leather, tattoos and
very long hair. But when he haltingly contrasts the pervasive starkness
found in this very rich society with the "bright and shiny" tones of Frida
Kahlo (his "least favorite") and characterizes hers as "the art of the
repressed," it's the film's most original statement and an unexpected
highlight.
The northern pagans celebrate the eventual
return of the sun during the longest and the darkest nights of winter 行 a
ritual hijacked by Christianity as Christmas. And black metal, according to
Haraldstad, is "darkness with a capital D."
