A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

Mysterious; Dark; Beautiful; Mysterious; Sombre; Mystical; Magic; Realms; Twirling, in the Night; Pulchritudinous; Clouds

The world seeps into a dark somber; a dark cyclone into absolute trinity; tranquility spins... The first moments of nature..

Reflections Water

The first scenes..transportive; and carry it into realms

Enter Utopia

Ash tipped Clouds; Fire..Primal Light & Darkness dance in the sombre

Meandering conversations pursue, profound; why follow paths? We can follow paths to a certain goal, but ultimately it is impossible; why restrict ourselves with rigid paths; predictability. It is not true

The young, old; old nature, old life; young life, old life

Blood red clouds; primal passion The bodies, embrace in Nature

Time is taken here..not rushed.. it is slow; dreamy. Time is taken truly here; it is slowed down; all is calm. As Malick has said, people are rushed to talk in the modern age, and must speak quickly; here, time is in the essence, or merely does not exist.

The paradox; paragon; infinity; center The persona; discusses the trance of the rave, entering the zone, in sync with the earth, and others; immorph into one; metaphysical

Enter Shangri-La

Sunlight, smoke; the decimation of time..

Ancient Poets; ancient powers

Utopia

The time moves slowly..so slow.. A boat; a silhouette on the distant sunrise/sunset; cloud, the sun bleaches clouds..

Distant Distant light against the water...

Animal kingdom

Modernism & Nature Memories of livelihood

The mosaics spin into one...

Eyes; three beads of light Tarkovsky..Fire..House

Fire Fire Triangle Fire Tribal

Screams in the dark The meditative finale..ancient, soul touching...

Chants.. sighs..release; freedom; radical Power Magic Energy

Wildness; release...let go

The pure unmarked naked fury Passion Breath-taking

Our masks, eventually fall away

Lights Intense Emotion

Like a a subconscious wave; an abstract whole rhythm; heavenly, enigma Enter the sync, the trance All heart, soul; electric The insanity Special..

The scene; life changing In that moment, all are connected to life

Nothing mattered; primal; life unleashed Man, Beast? Truthful

It has rendered my barriers naked Transporting; enlightening

Into the vortex

It fills my soul..

A spell, to ward off the darkness

Like nothing before..

Like nothing else..

First of all, let's get one thing clear: this movie is not about Scandinavian Doom Metal as the previous reviewer puts it. Hell, even I'm not sure exactly what this film is exactly about - but what I know - the last half an hour consists of pretty decent Shoegazing kind of Raw Black Metal.

Not the satanic stuff, mind you. Yes, there are healthy dosage of different themes explored in Black Metal, besides the traditional anti-religious stuff.

So, that being said, the only giveaway of this later section of this enjoyable film is the title font and the end of the movie itself. Other than that the movie hides it's Black Metal and portrays a mellow lifestyle that's somewhat slow, somewhat woody and somewhat butt-plugged. Yeah. Somewhat even Hippy. And yes, here they are - terms "Hippy" and "Black Metal" put together in one review, in a complimentary sense.

This movie will be shown at an open-air cinema festival in Latvia. And I'm wondering - how many clueless people will soil their pants at the end of the movie? How many people will just walk away from the las 45-or so minutes of the film? How many people will feel that they bought tickets for the wrong film?

And how many people will just head-bang the living crap out of their necks, when the tremolo picking and blast-beats kick in? A fun pieces of thought to entertain.

Overall - this is a different kind of documentary that deals with themes common in Black Metal (except the lively Hippy stuff). It's very slow, deliberate and in times - funny as the concept of Hell itself.

It depicts various things.

It depicts a group of people living in a friendly and philosophical community. It depicts some gorgeous forest scenes in those slow and moody scenes.

And it depicts a man that lives in this community, that enjoys the woods somewhat more that the average person does, and this man happens to play in a Black Metal band. You can't go wrong with this combo!

An interesting combination of elements, and therefore an interesting film to watch.

7/10 easily.

Usually I make a point of staying until the end of films at the cinema or at a festival...once I stayed until the end of a Bruce LaBruce movie after 2/3 of the audience walked out...but I couldn't make it through this, even though one of the directors was sitting right behind me.

The first 45 minutes has it's moments, though the fly-on-the-wall style isn't conducive to much insight....there really should have been someone with more awareness than a fly to edit it...there are nice scenes among a hippie commune in Finland though.

The last half hour of what I saw was basically concert footage of a doom metal gig...if you're one of the few people who gets this music you might enjoy it, to me; it was like having a migraine.

Really sorry I can't be more positive...any movie that encourages communal living and a more basic lifestyle should be encouraged, but the endless doom metal just ruined it for me.

I huddled close to the screen with three former black metal friends when this played the Thessaloniki film festival. I was familiar with one of the directors, Rivers, his rituals of ruins and time, and knew from the press release that it somehow involved black metal music. So I brought everyone over.

The opening shot is like out of Bela Tarr, the camera pans for endless minutes across a lake from dusk to dark. The question with this sort of film that often vexes people is what does it mean, why take so long? It means nothing, it decides the canvas, it's the preparatory guitar riff that sketches an outline of sound, the glimpse of nature that you get when you unzip your camping tent in the morning of the first day of vacation, the experience is all ahead to unfold on this place that is at first only the stage for it.

Superficially we have here three stops on a journey: life in an island commune, a solitary trek through Norwegian nature, about the third in a minute.

Everything you need to know about its premise is in the first segment. A group of boys in the commune are building a stucture, one of them talks about utopian architecture and how vision is exploration in a general direction. We can see this in what they build: it is roughly a skeleton of a few wooden beams, no use has been agreed yet that we know, it merely marks, sketches, the space in which something will appear in time.

In the trek through nature we have solitude and reflection away from life, cessation. Woods, a bonfire at night, reading alone in a room, a few atmospheres and all of this still exploration in a general direction. It's not the end of the film though, which maybe says, we have to return to things themselves.

No it's the last segment that is the most powerful, this return to things. If you come to this it should be to see what these guys set out to do in this part and if they managed to do it.

Cleverly they made this the most challenging part to sit through and most apparently aimless. In the first part we had, however aimless, a flow of life, quirky individuals and that hilarious story with fingers in asses (one of the funniest in film), in the second we could admire at some beautiful scenery, or entertain platitudes about 'onenness'.

The third one is a black metal gig in real time. It permits no easy anchor. The sound and imagery are conventionally ugly, there is nothing to really hold on to.

The screen goes black and stays black as a noisy guitar spell is conjured from darkness, the sound goes on for a while in pure darkness. In the theater next to me people started fidgeting, made uncomfortable.

We then acquire the world it comes from, the context; a band playing, probably a rehearsal. Within that first image, we have swimming between sounds, bringing to the fore each time a different facet and texture; drums, bass, vocals. Then more sculpting of world, after several minutes the camera turns and finds an audience in attendance, they had been there all this time. It further finds as part of the group the same man we've been following since the commune, there all this time.

The film is this journey to a subtler sense of that place in which something appears, perception. In this place which other films would establish with a single shot, these guys find plasticity and room.

It's heady in the execution. But it has trivial value as little more than an exercise. I'd much rather find it in a Bela Tarr film or Weeresethakul.

As a shorthand we call these things meditations. Meditation, actual meditation in the Buddhist way, is about unwavering perception, and you find out; every moment is richly layered, and all the more so as you sit.

This film is daunting and made me feel like a complete Philistine. Some of it was a beautiful and unnerving, the hermit or the little blond girl running around in a cardi. The commune part just felt comfortable, some of the hermit part too,since I used to live a similar life in parts of those two,funnily enough my former life also involved the metal part as well.

So in a way the movie, for me was personal and completely freaked me out. I found it invasive and thought, how did you know what i was doing when I was young.

I have often wondered myself lately, maybe I should have stayed doing as i was considering the artificial nature of existence in the city.

Was I having way more fun living in the country roaming around with a massive bearded Latvian dude oft times partaking in small live music concerts but generally just raising metal hell together in a remote shack with massive amps.

I think the answer to the question in the film is SH*T HAPPENED.

the answer to the second question posed by the film would be sh*t will continue to happen because it has happened in the past and keen observers of history will gleefully point out that humans have a bad habit of repeating stupid mistakes.

I think this is in part because of lack of decent historical education but probably in full because of human nature and the time constrictions of the human life span.

Now can the filmmakers please tell me what the film was about, because if the synopsis is correct and it was about spirituality, then wtf there is no such thing.

That is a lesson hard learned.

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