monks – the transatlantic feedback

In the organizer's words:

Dietmar Post, Lucía Palacios, DE/US/ES 2006, 100 min, German/English OmeU

The story sounds like the stuff of a fake documentary in the rock music milieu: as ingenious as it is improbable. Five GI soldiers who, after serving on an army base in Hesse in the mid-1960s, make a solid living with their cover band, meet two graduates of the art academies in Ulm and Essen. The result is a manifesto and an image: instead of long hair, they now wear monk's cowls and tonsures. Always. Under the influence of Fluxus and Minimal Art, the songs became increasingly monotonous and repetitive. The film by Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios uses interviews with the protagonists and extensive documentary material to tell the story of the tragedy of a band that was at least ten years ahead of its time, of the Cold War and the stuffy Ludwig Erhard Germany shortly before the upheavals of 1968.

Following the film screening, archive material from the early years of pop culture in West Germany will be shown (including Neu, Embryo, Aamon Düül, Can, Cluster).