Until The Light Takes Us
Until The Light Takes Us: a documentary about arson, murder, and somewhere along the line, metal gets a mention.
Apart from the appropriately crude filmic style, the only semblance of continuity running throughout Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s contrived drama is that it consistently has little, if anything, to do with black metal.
The narrative is monopolised by Varg Vikernes / “Count Grishnackh”’s diatribes on insurrection (yawn), blaming Christ and America for all the evils of the modern world, and then likening his martyr-like captivity in a Norwegian penitentiary to a monastical seclusion.
After eloquently establishing his bigotry, Vikernes goes on to poke holes in the already questionable auditory aesthetic of the black metal genre, claiming that during Burzum recordings his aim was to make the music sound as awful as possible. Job done.
Clearly, for the Count, the medium is inconsequential, but perhaps a goose-stepping youth rally would have been more suited to his political thrusts and utopian dreams of mass-cleansing.
Until The Light Takes Us is not about black metal and its conceptus, but rather about a bunch of self-sequestered Norwegians whose boredom with an idyllic existence led them to stock pile weapons, burn some churches and murder each other. Their music was, at best, a by-product of this absurdity. The film does nothing to undo the damaging stereotypes that, for decades, have portrayed the associated genre as ridiculous and ideologically unfounded.
Gylve Nagell (Darkthrone) delivers the final irony in a petulant mission statement, the premise of which apparently being a deliberate effort to not step “…in the garish footsteps of what became black metal…”. In this, they have been admittedly successful; the self-proclaimed pioneers of the genre are either dead, incarcerated, or so hell-bent on defying popularity that their work continues to be hidden in obscure irrelevance.
The level of significance Vikernes assigns to the music itself is about as much significance as you should assign to this misrepresented film. If you’re looking for rants on nihilism, read Nietzsche. At least then you’ll be spared the agony of the band(s) members’ unjustified arrogance and the accompanying Mayhem sound bites.
Until The Light Takes US is now available for pre-order on DVD at http://www.blackmetalmovie.com, and is screening at the Belgian Cinematek in Brussels, 8th December, and the ICA in London from 15th – 31st December. DVD release date is also 15th December.
