DECLASSIFIED: THE MUTOID WASTE FILES The Mutoid Waste Company 1989 - 1994 D 1989/2015 Duration: 91′
Director: Uli Happe Camera: Uli Happe Editor: Uli Happe & Bernd Böhlendorf Producer: Uli Happe Music: Mutoid Waste Company, 7 Kevins, Spiral Tribe, DNTT.
The Mutoid Waste Co. are a group of sculptors, musicians, performance and multidisciplinary artists. As the group’s name suggests, they mutate waste, which then sets as the background for their installations, performances, parties and events. With the use of all types of scrap as their raw material, from industrial to domestic and from huge derelict military machines to small everyday items, they have created a new form of art crossing boundaries of sculpture, mechanical-art, performance, theater and music. Founded in 1984 by the London artists Joe Rush and Robin Cooke, the Mutoids had a significant impact everywhere they worked and performed, from legendary London warehouse raves to the ‘Car Henge’ sculpture in Glastonbury 1987. They went on world tour in 1989 and have been mostly a mobile crew since, traveling and leaving their unmistakable mark around the world, including London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Italy, Japan, Australia and more. Being so visually unique, the Mutoids have attracted many photographers and film makers who tried to capture the Mutoid experience on film. None was allowed a deeper entry to their world than the Berlin film maker Uli Happe, whose film shows the most intimate and most spectacular moments of these adventurous times
Isabelle Eberhardt is a 1991 Australian-French biographical drama film directed by Ian Pringle. The film follows the adult life of Isabelle Eberhardt and was filmed in Algiers, Paris and Geneva. It stars Mathilda May as Eberhardt and Peter O'Toole as Hubert Lyautey. It received financial backing from the Film Finance Corporation Australia and was nominated for three awards at the 1991 Australian Film Institute Awards.
Isabelle Eberhardt was screened at the 1991 Melbourne International Film Festival and was also released in cinemas in Australia, though did not have a home media release. The film received generally negative reviews.
Forty years ago two USF anthropologists George and Sharon Gmelch lived for one year in a barrel top wagon with travellers on a halting site in Dublin. Four decades later they have returned to Ireland with a huge archive of photographs to find the people they once knew to learn what has happened in their lives in the intervening years.
When the Gmelch's first came to Ireland in 1970 accommodation for travellers was a big issue. They were young anthropology students looking for an area of Irish culture to study. They became interested in travellers and soon they were living among them in order to study their culture close up. They carried out some of the first academic research into travellers and published a number of books including 'The Urbanisation of an Itinerant People', 'Tinkers and Travellers' and 'Nan-The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman'.
Now, in their mid 60's, the Gmelchs return to a very different Ireland to undertake their final 'field study' with Irish Travellers.
Europe 1988: Mutoid Waste founder Robin Mutoid conceives a journey across the Australian desert, which will fuse a 'mader than Max' blend of theatre. protest, lifestyle and performance.
12 years later Robin heads to Port Augusta in Australia's far south to see who will answer the call. Those who come will be challenged on every conceivable level on their 20,000km journey, bringing them together as a community and allowing them all to participate in a fascinating study into 'lateral human governance'. Sometimes violent, often humorous and always passionate, this is their story.
"Bangkok 1996 alone at two in the morning bought back that same feeling I had on the first day at school. My mother released my hand and she walked back toward the gate from where we had arrived together at the huge strange building. The night seems to be oily about me with humidity, the airport is a reasonably calm environment with a yellow electric hum reflecting off huge windows all around you. There are uniforms framing many faces, some questions, a stamp, and nobody bothers to check baggage on the way in. Then the final set of doors open and you are standing on the other side, in the black spicy hot box of Asian night and a thousand taxi drivers are yelling at you, someone wants to carry your bag, and you know there is a bus station around here somewhere. But then you learn that the busses stop at midnight, and with safety being in numbers and with my American friend emerging from the crowd, we begin negotiations with a cheerful beetle stained mouth. The taxi takes us to Thanon Koa San, or Khao San Road, the tourist ghetto of Bangkok where all budget backpackers and twisted travellers gather. Fresh off the plane and with suburban stories of kidnap, theft and corruption running in my mind, I insisted upon taking my rucksack inside the taxi, making the journey a cramped one. My face pressed against the dirty glass I watched the scenes of black smoking buses, families on scooters, pedestrians in single file and single light bulb-lit eating places flash by. Pitch black canals crossed by crazy drivers and the gilded flat portraits of the asthmatic looking king everywhere, flashing bursts of radio fly by as our driver takes every opportunity to keep moving in the solid traffic, occasionally mounting the median strip or sidewalk." - from an almost finished novel about the global rave freak scene in the 90s.
Another short section published here.
HISTORY of INDIA LEH LADAKH full length new edit, better colours, photos, longer documentary 1979. This is Ed van der Kooy's video diary made with an 8 mm camera in 1979. Ed made his first trip to Ladakh and filmed and photographed a beautiful country. He hopes you like it. The music is added later but the movie was shot just after the Indian government opened the road to the capital Leh, Ladakh in 1978. The 1979 8mm film The Last Shangri La by Ed van der Kooy is a 1950s Old Nepal full documentary.
This film is a glimpse of the traditional life of the Afghan people, their culture and their music, just before the Russian invasion in 1979.
About Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion in Dec.1979. Border unrest, trade routes blocked and the Afghan mujahideen is about to take up arms against the intruder. In April 1978, the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in a bloody coup d'état against then-President Mohammed Daoud Khan, in what is called the Saur Revolution. The PDPA declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, with its first leader named as People's Democratic Party general secretary Nur Muhammad Taraki.
The Saur Revolution (/saʊər/; Dari: إنقلاب ثور or ۷ ثور (literally 7th Saur); Pashto: د ثور انقلاب), also romanized Sowr Revolution, and alternatively called the April Revolution or April Coup, was the process by which the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan on 27–28 April 1978, who had himself taken power in the 1973 Afghan coup d'état. Daoud Khan and most of his family were killed at the presidential palace by military officers in support of the PDPA. The revolution resulted in the creation of a Soviet-aligned government with Nur Muhammad Taraki as President (General Secretary of the Revolutionary Council). Saur or Sowr is the Dari (Persian) name of the second month of the Solar Hijri calendar, the month in which the uprising took place.
The revolution was ordered by PDPA member Hafizullah Amin, who would become a significant figure in the revolutionary government; at a press conference in New York in June 1978, Amin claimed that the event was not a coup but a revolution by the "will of the people". The coup involved heavy fighting and resulted in many deaths. The Saur Revolution was a significant event in Afghanistan's history, marking the onset of 43 years of conflict in the country.
Lord Glenconner, a Scot, once owned Mustique, a verdant island in the Caribbean. He lives in St. Lucia with wife Lady Anne Coke (herself an Earl's daughter and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret) and their sole surviving son, Christopher, disabled by an accident. Glenconner visits Mustique, explores old haunts, and prepares an outdoor lunch for the Princess. He gets on with his wife; he's charming, irritable, waspish, a snob. With Margaret, he's unctuous and outrageously ribald. It's up close and personal with this aging, white-robed, old-moneyed European amongst black workers and nouveau riche Americans. A portrait emerges of the rich against the backdrop of third-world paradise while Lord Glenconner shouts, stamps his feet, throws things and demands obedience of anyone who happens to be useful at the time.
Kent Adonai, who features a few times in the film ,was left £22 million by Lord Glenconner when he died in 2010. Lord Glenconner's grandson Cody was thought to be his heir but was only left a single stone phallus from India.
Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable. - Isabelle Eberhardt
Actress Juliet Stevenson retraces the journeys of turn-of-the-century traveler and writer Isabelle Eberhardt. BBC, 1994.
Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was a Swiss explorer and author. As a teenager, Eberhardt, educated in Switzerland by her father, published short stories under a male pseudonym. She became interested in North Africa, and was considered a proficient writer on the subject despite learning about the region only through correspondence. After an invitation from photographer Louis David, Eberhardt moved to Algeria in May 1897. She dressed as a man and converted to Islam, eventually adopting the name Si Mahmoud Saadi. Eberhardt's unorthodox behaviour made her an outcast among European settlers in Algeria and the French administration.
Eberhardt's acceptance by the Qadiriyya, an Islamic order, convinced the French administration that she was a spy or an agitator. She survived an assassination attempt shortly thereafter. In 1901, the French administration ordered her to leave Algeria, but she was allowed to return the following year after marrying her partner, the Algerian soldier Slimane Ehnni. Following her return, Eberhardt wrote for a newspaper published by Victor Barrucand and worked for General Hubert Lyautey. In 1904, at the age of 27, she was killed by a flash flood in Aïn Séfra.
Isabelle was a journalist and war correspondent. Her disguise helped her to penetrate the peoples of the Sahara to get to know their customs. In Aïn Sefra she met Lyautey, a general charged with the task of reestablishing order on the border between Algeria and Morocco. With him, Isabelle was able to enter the camps and observe the conflicts first-hand. Not only did she disguise herself as a man, she also observed military discipline and was treated the same way as the other soldiers. In 1904 Isabelle she met up with her husband in Aïn Sefra and in a flash flood their clay house collapsed on top of them. “I know that this way of life is dangerous, but the moment of danger is also the moment of hope,” she wrote. She published many articles during her lifetime, and after her death her diaries and fiction were published.
Made in 1967 it has become a classic Australian adventure film. The film shows Aboriginal tribal life in Arnhem Land and an incredible journey through the Gulf of Carpentaria and up Cape York.
Time Shift looks at the historical, cultural and political influences that have shaped the lifestyles of Britain's New Age Travellers
Travellers have roamed Britain for centuries and New Age Travellers have adopted many Gypsy traditions in an attempt to become genuine nomads themselves. Challenging mainstream society has been central to their motivation, Inevitably this has brought them into conflict with landowners and the police.
Fergus Colville's Time Shift documentary takes a fresh look; following the story from the early 1970s search for an alternative way of life, to the present day, where legislation and increasing fragmentation have eroded both the appeal and viability of being a New Age Traveller.
We managed to get some unique and previously unscreened archive of the Stonehenge festivals which helps to give a different perspective on the news reporting of the time.
This is an intriguing, intimate account of one of the most celebrated Sound Systems in Europe, offering in-depth interviews with Heretik members as well as their arch-nemesis, officer Jaques Prigent.
Heretik is more than just a Sound System—it’s a political statement. They became a symbol of the free party movement and they were clear in their Heretik ways: We do not conform to the established standards of conduct. They were the “newbies” at the ’95 Teknival in Tamos, amongst established systems like Spiral Tribe. This was a lifestyle that certainly resonated with them and by ’96 they set up their own first party.
“It’s a different life, living in a truck, living outside of society, living far from capitalism. {…} I want to follow people that are open minded, that have an impact, that know things.”
The police were always right behind them; when the system was busted for their respective drug stashes, a five-month stint in jail resulted in the prohibition of attending any of these magical, illegal parties. Suffice to say, that didn’t keep them away, on the contrary—they now saw themselves as “musical terror activists,” spreading messages like: Free parties should be recognized as a public utility. The cat-and-mouse game continued all over France and ex-officer of the French Police Intelligence Unit, Jaques Prigent, is the first to admit that Heretik had magnificent organizational skills—they weren’t always easy to track down.
The Dongas Movie was shot at Brian's Field & Sherborne in Dorset. This video was created by a German Television production company and expresses a desire for a sustainable life on Planet Earth. The people who participated are Collin & Jo & Tansy, Liz & Soren, Brian, Tegwyn & Elkana, Sam(antha) & Joya & Tom, Sarah, Vicky, Laugh, Gipsey John and the people of Sherborne.
The Dongas Tribe was a collection of road protesters and travellers in England, noted for their occupation of Twyford Down outside Winchester, Hampshire. The name Dongas comes from the Matabele word for "gully", given by Winchester locals to the deep drovers' tracks on Twyford Down.
John Vidal, writing in The Guardian in 2012, said of The Dongas that "the 15-20 urban youths who camped out to try to defend Twyford Down in 1992 are recognised to have fired up British environmental protest and kickstarted a major shift in green attitudes in both government and the public."
The Twyford Down protest was a protest against the M3 motorway extension which destroyed some rich ecological sites, one of the very few habitats of the Chalkhill Blue butterfly and six species of rare orchid, and ancient monuments there (SSSI and Scheduled Ancient Monument).
Following "Yellow Wednesday", when hordes of police and security guards invaded the camp to bulldoze the area, the Dongas Tribe left Twyford Down for Bramdean Common. Earth First!, who had been heavily involved in the setting up and support of the camp and actions, continued the protests and restarted a camp in Plague Pits Valley.
They constituted about twenty people. Some of the tribe maintained involvement in various subsequent road protests (Solsbury Hill, North Wales, Newbury bypass), but gradually morphed into a semi-nomadic "tribe", traveling the South West of England on foot, squatting various hill-forts and putting on seasonal gatherings in an attempt to reawaken a sense of connectedness with the land. The last of the nomadic Dongas were travelling in Cornwall until the end of 1999, after which some moved to France to continue their nomadic lifestyle.
The cutting at Twyford Down, during construction of the M3 motorway in 1994. Some of the 'original Dongas' (as they became called) of the mid 1990s were musicians who made a living by busking, sometimes using traditional music from Brittany.
The first child born in the Dongas tribe, to Rosie Lambert, was named May Brigit "Donga" Lambert and was born on 1 May 1994, Beltane and May Day.
Counter culture collective project of DIY cyberculture and techno parties. Robin Mutoid of 'Mutoid Waste Company' heads to Port Augusta in Australia's far south to see who will answer the call. Those who come will be challenged on every conceivable level on their 20,000km journey, bringing them together as a community and allowing them all to participate in a fascinating study into 'lateral human governance'. Sometimes violent, often humorous and always passionate, this is their story.
In 1989 at the age of 20 I hitchhiked the 200kms to Byron Bay, Australia from my university town of Toowoomba.
I and my friend Ben were on our way to see Canned Heat. We had about sixty dollars between us and a bag of good dreams. We got to Byron Bay and spent the days hanging out in the park or on the beach. We discovered that the main members of Canned Heat were all dead (Wilson and Hite). As well tickets to see them were thirty dollars each. Way too much for us. So we slept in the park along with a group of art students from Brisbane (among others) and spent our days just hanging out in the street or on the beach. We met a German sitar player named Sangeet, who played in the street and lived in his station wagon. Hours were spent free listening to his drone and tones.
We ate once a day, a vegetarian burger from the same organic cafe at midday. We spent two weeks in Byron, until the money ran out and we hitched home. It was a turning point in my life, I am just not sure in which direction.
Artistic montage of Teknivals, illegal raves and festivals from all over Europe, and the life of new age travellers and ravers on the road. Reminds me of my life between 1995-2000.
Bus music as journey through late autumn in crowded space. Cramped cockpit of faces in blond wood. Small red shack towns on the edge of tiger forest like green robe draped across the shoulders of the world. Sweden. Early in the century. Back again tomorrow.
Keef, Mick and Ronnie travel to Tangier, Morocco to record with the 'Master Muscians of Jajouka' for the track "Continental Drift". Mick visits Paul Bowles and Keef remembers Morocco of the 60's and Brian Jones. Shot 16th and 17th June and broadcasted by the BBC 10th Dec. 1989. Lots of footage and music originating from the Rif Mounntains and the Jajouka trance musicians performing music from the pre-Islamic Rites of Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins.
From "Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka", Rolling Stones Records, October 1971.
MAGIC calls itself The Other Method for controlling matter and knowing space. In Morocco, magic is practised more assiduously than hygiene though, indeed, ecstatic dancing to music of the brotherhoods may be called a form of psychic hygiene. You know your own music when you hear it one day.You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.
My own music turned out to be the wild flutes of the hill tribe, Ahl Serif whom I met through the Moroccan painter, Hamri. He turned me on to the Moorish fleshpots, the Magic and the misery of the Moors. The secret of his mother's tribe, guarded even from themselves, was that they were still performing the Rites of Pan under their ragged cloak of Islam.
Westermark, in his book on pagan survivals in Morocco forty years ago, recognized their patron: Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins, to be Pan the little goat god with his pipes. An account of their dances led him to conclude they must be celebrating the Roman Lupercalia which once occurred in the first two weeks of February, but attached itself to the principal Moslem feast when the Arab invaders turned the calendar back to the lunar year. Westermark never saw the dances and believed they no longer took place. Pan may soon stop dancing in the Moroccan hills but I first saw him there in 1950. Later I ran several times in the panic of the Lupercalia. It is the "holy chase" of which Julius Caesar speaks in Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play: "Forget not, in your haste, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia; for our elders say the barren, touched in this holy chase, shake off their sterile curse." Marc Antony should be wearing a fresh, foul-smelling goatskin. "I saw Marc Antony offer him a crown; yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of those coronets. .."
Bou Jeloud wears a yokel's big, floppy straw hat, bound round his face with a fillet of ivy. ". . . it was mere foolery; I did not mark it." Elizabethan "Morris" dances were Moorish .
Pan, Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins, dances through eight moonlit nights in his hill village, Joujouka, to the wailing of his hundred Master Musicians. Down in the towns, far away by the seaside, you can hear the wild whimper of his oboe-like raïtas; a faint breath of panic borne on the wind. Below the rough palisade of giant blue cactus surrounding the village on its hilltop, the music flows in streams to nourish and fructify the terraced fields below.
Inside the village the thatched houses crouch low in their gardens to hide the deep cactus-lined lanes. You come through their maze to the broad village green where the pipers are piping; fifty raïtas banked against a crumbling wall below sheet lightning to shatter the air. Fifty wild flutes blow up a storm in front of them, while a platoon of small boys in long belted white robes and brown wool turbans drums like young thunder. All the villagers, dressed in best white, swirl in great circles and coils around one wildman in skins.
Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air on the music, races after the women again and again, lashing at them fiercely with his flails. "Forget not in your speed, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia . . ." He is wild. He is mad. Sowing panic. Lashing at anyone; striking real terror into the crowd. Women scatter like white marabout birds all aflutter and settle on a little hillock for safety, all huddled in one quivering lump. They throw back their heads to the moon and scream with throats open to the gullet, lolling their tongues around their empty heads like the clapper in a bell.
Every mouth is wide open, frozen into an O. Head back and hot narrow eyes brimming with dangerous baby. Bou Jeloud is after you. Running. Over-run, Laughter and someone is crying. Wild dogs at your heels. Swirling around in one ring-a-rosy, around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More and No More and No! More! Pipes crack in your head. Ears popped away at barrier sound and you deaf. Or dead! Swirling around in cold moonlight, surrounded by wild men or ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you, butting you, beating you, taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great wind drops out of your head and you hear the heavenly music again. You feel sorry and loving and tender to that poor animal whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing there beside you like somebody out of ether .Who is that? That is you.
Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? The shivering boy who was chosen to be stripped naked in a cave and sewn into the bloody warm skins and masked with an old straw hat tied over his face, HE is Bou Jeloud when he dances and runs. Not Ali, not Mohamed, then he is Bou Jeloud. He will be somewhat taboo in his village the rest of his life. When he dances alone, his musicians blow a sound like the earth sloughing its skin. He is the Father of Fear. He is, too, the Father of Flocks. The good shepherd works for him. When the goats, gently grazing, brusquely frisk and skitter away, he is counting his flock. When you shiver like someone just walked on your grave—that's him: that's Pan, the Father of Skins. Have you jumped out of your skin lately? I've got you under my skin.
Up there, in Joujouka. you sleep all day—if the flies let you. Breakfast is goat-cheese and honey on gold bread from the outdoor oven. Musicians loll about sipping mint tea, their kif pipes and flutes. They never work in their lives so they lie about easy. The last priests of Pan cop a tithe on the crops in the lush valley below. Blue kif smoke drops in veils from Joujouka at nightfall. The music picks up like a current turned on. The children are singing, "Ha, Bou Jeloud! Bou Jeloud the butcher met Aisha Homolka, Ha, Bou Jeloud!"
On the third night he meets Aisha Homolka who drifts around after dark, cool and casual, near springs and running water. She unveils her beautiful blue-glittering face and breasts and coos. And he who stammers out an answer is lost. He is lost unless he touches the blade of his knife or, better still, plucks it out and plunges it into the grcund between her goatish legs and forked hooves. Then Aisha Homolka, Aisha Kandisha, alias Asherat, Astarte, Diana in the Leaves Greene, Blest Virgin Miriam bar Levy, the White Goddess, in short, will be his. She must be a heavy Stone Age matriarch whose power he cuts off with his Iron Age knife-magic.
The music grooves into hysteria, fear and fornication. A ball of laughter and tears in the throat gristle. Tickle of panic between the legs. Gripe of slap-stick cuts loose in the bowels. The Three Hadji. Man with Monkey. More characters coming on stage. The Hadji joggle around under their crowns like Three Wise Kings. Monkey Man comes on hugely pregnant with a live boy in his baggy pants. Monkey Man goes into birth pangs and the Hadji deliver him of a naked boy with an umbilical halter around his neck. Man leads Monkey around, beating him and screwing him for hours to the music. Monkey jumps on Man's back and screws him to the music for hours. Pipers pipe higher into the air and panic screams off like the wind intothe woods of silverolive and black oak, on into the Rif mountains swimming up under the moonlight.
L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age) is a 1930 surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film cost a million francs to produce and was financed by the nobleman Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who beginning in 1928 commissioned a film every year for the birthday of his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles. When it was first released, there was a storm of protest. The film premiered at Studio 28 in Paris on 29 November 1930 after receiving its permit from the Board of Censors. In order to get the permit, Buñuel had to present the film to the Board as the dream of a madman. On 3 December 1930, a group of incensed members of the fascist League of Patriots threw ink at the screen, assaulted members of the audience, and destroyed art works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and others on display in the lobby. On 10 December, the Prefect of Police of Paris, Jean Chiappe, arranged to have the film banned after the Board of Censors reviewed the film. The Noailles family pulled the film from distribution for nearly 50 years. The film did not have its official United States premiere until 1-15 November 1979 at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco.
While in Paris last week we took tea at Studio 28 where L'Âge d'Or was first shown in 1930, in the foyer of the cinema are pictures of the wrecked theater after the opening night when a riot ensued.
Anyone visiting Paris I recommend a visit to Le Studio 28, 10 rue Tholozé, 75018 Paris (in Montmartre just up the hill from Pigalle Metro)It provides a glimpse of a Paris that has all but disappeared over the past half century.
