Disappointing, very disappointing. I guess I'll start from the technical stand point and transition to story. This documentary from beginning to end displayed the fact that basically anyone with a little bit of money can buy a HD cam then shoot and distribute a film without any technical background and thus creating zero art form. The opening consists of numerous amounts of would be unusable shots of hand held, out of focus, non-steady footage of Fenriz of Darkthrone walking to the subway, pubs, or 7-11 set to trance music. The majority of this film displays a massive lack of camera operating skill where it looked like the operator just walked around Norway filming any bird or bee in their path. Several pictures were shown of Mayhem, Burzum, and Emperor that were too small of a resolution rate and looked disgustingly distorted on the screen. I honestly couldn't believe that they were satisfied with the finished product when it left the editing room for a work print. There's even a scene where they filmed from the subway through the window for a nice portrait of the setting winter Sun except that there was a HUGE smear on the camera lens completely ruining the shot. I filmed a TV Episode for the Travel Channel all over Norway a few years back, where we filmed identical scenes of Oslo and Bergen and if we had been responsible for a 10th of the bad shots they used in this, we would have been fired immediately, and that was while I was still in film school that I was able to handle that at only 21 years of age. The only scenes that the camera isn't completely a mess, is when they sat down to interview Immortal, Fenriz in the white room and Varg Vikernes in prison. And by this I only mean that the camera was steady on the tripod (which is something you can learn to do from any instructional booklet) not that there was any artistic side to this documentary style interviewing. Varg's interviews looked dry and dull. I'm all about a natural and anti-Hollywood look whenever there is a chance, but you still have to throw some kicker in the back a couple flags on the side and CTO over the top and alter some of the light coming in through the window. Fenriz's interview in the white room was so blown out that I can't believe the filmmakers allowed these shots go to print. It was almost unbearable to look at and was screaming for color correction all over the place. Immortal's interview was another setting where they didn't use any lights but what was provided in the pub which was saving grace for the filmmakers. The overhead light from the pub glared down on Abbath's head who was wearing a black leather jacket, black sunglasses, a black shirt, and black pants while sipping a dark brew which gave the interview a dramatic and intriguing look though as anyone could guess purely by accident. Usually in a documentary, you have some basic composition language going on with establishing shots cutting to medium shots cutting to close ups, etc. but the editing of this film was what put me over the top because it was so random and contributed to the downfall of this documentary rather than tying it together. Usually when a film's cinematography is as bad as this film's, there is a payoff in quality of story. The huge problem with this film's story: there was NO story. At all. The entire 110 minutes was a series of random clips of interviews stating opinions rather than fact and set to a few trance and black metal tracks. There was no point and they had no closure at the end. In the beginning it looked like they were trying to piece together a bit of history by discussing Burzum's early work, A Blaze In The Northern Sky, and Deathcrush but instead it kept going in circles of images of church burnings, opinions on black metal becoming trendy, therefore avoiding any direction. I really thought this was going to be a documentary that avoided the hype of Dead's suicide, Euronymous' murder, and the church burnings but anytime they got to a tiny bit of insight they would show 10 seconds of it and go straight back to the pieces of the stories that everyone already knows about. Like Fenriz's statements about being Norwegian: "To be Norwegian is like to be at the bus stop waiting for the bus, but always staying 2 or 3 meters from every other person". That kind of insight was really useful and I was hoping for more of that and maybe an explanation of why corpse paint became such a huge part of black metal or why Norwegians feel such a bigger connection to black metal than the Swedes or Danes, their fellow Scandinavians who paved the way for black metal in the early 80s. One of the very few scenes that I liked other than the interview that Fenriz has with the magazine journalist over the phone which is hilarious, was the live art exhibit in Milan, that Frost of Satyricon and 1349 chose to perform in. He, in full corpse paint and leather gear, blew fire onto the paintings, took a blade to his forearm and cut himself deep all as a crowd of bystanders looked on in shock. But again his interviews along with everyone else's really made black metal and extreme music in general look extremely childish. Maybe I'm biased because I've been a fan of this style of music for 9 years and I feel that this poorly made documentary disgraced the scene. In closing, this is the era we live in. Anyone can download Final Cut Pro onto their MacBook, buy a $4,000 camera, and shoot and edit. This is 2009. But that doesn't make you an artist. And when the subject truly is a mystifying art, that art suffers.
Review of Until the Light Takes Us
