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The Misanthrope: Nocturno Culto
by ©Scarlet Metal Archive www.whoresofchaos.com
20-08-2007

The directorial debut from Darkthrone's Nocturno Culto,
the guitarist and vocalist of Darkthrone.
Label: Peaceville Records
http://www.peaceville.com
http://www.tyrantsyndicate.com
http://www.myspace.com/tyrantsyndicate

Finally got a peek at Nocturno Culto's film 'The Misanthrope',
which was given to me by someone visiting from Norway.
It was a very bumpy viewing due to my computer not being totally
compatible with my external dvd drive. At times the screen went blurry
and the audio was at times fairly distorted throughout. This is partly
due to my preference of listening to music without "visuals",
which allows me to create my own visuals from mind/imagination.
Anyway, after hearing the wisecracks Fenriz makes (in the film)
about "technological disadvantages/disadvantaged", I started
thinking that just maybe this malfunction may have been a 'good thing'
as opposed to being a 'bad thing'.
The scenes cover a range of emotion: from to deadly serious to
extremely funny and at times it's high necro-comedy.
At the end of the comical ice fishing scene, Nocturno seems to "kiss"
and whisper to the fish, which is a native (indigenous) tradition
of thanking the animal for giving it's life (as food) for your's.
However, please don't run wild with anything I say here because it's
only a personal interpretation.
Firstly, Nocturno Culto a.k.a. Ted Skjellum proves that he possesses
both the necessary vision, creativity and photographic talent to make
a unique film/documentary.
Secondly, the rare Darkthrone footage and the 'up close and personal'
scenes of Nocturno Culto and friends (various famous Norwegian
black metal musicians) is most definitetly worth the price of the dvd
to any diehard Darkthrone fan and/or metal collector.
Yet, the most remarkable scenes in the film for me are the ones of
Knut ("the fakir"), in particular- his fascinating painting of Odin.
During some of the scenes Mr. Skjellum's desire for isolation and
general disgust for materialist/modern society is not unlike the disgust
of the character Alceste (who is disgusted with the superficiality
of Louis XIV's court) in Molière's 'The Misanthrope'.
Although this is a strange analogy due to Alceste eventually being
driven into ecclesiastical career,
a direction Mr. Skjellum surely will never go in.
Lastly, the scenes I pondered most were those in which Fenriz is
dragging a coffin with a body(?) in it through snow covered woods
and up a hill on a mountain road. At first, I just perceived it as fenriz
doing his anti-Christian thing..then the screen became blurry
(due to my technologically disadvantaged computer)
and at that point "Fenriz" was no longer identifiable. I just saw a
man who I imagined to be dragging a coffin up to the top of a hill
where he would burn him or leave him to the wolves and ravens
(according to ancient nordic tradition) or nail the coffin shut and
leave him to rot (according to some other religious traditions).
Anyway, the coffin dragging scenes made me angry about so many
things in this world- not just religious oppression but of clips of
polar bears in distress and the voice of a metereological expert,
"we really do not have the technology to predict how much global
temperatures will rise over the next 20 years" looped and echoed
in my head (from the global warming video I'd seen a few weeks
before at The Museum of Natural History).
I guess this means that all of the holes they've punched in the sky
over the past 45+ years haven't amounted to much technological
knowledge and advantage then? I looked up at the screen again
and saw what seemed to be the grim day that the "technologically
advantaged" thought was at least 10 million or whatever years away
and the last living man on the planet..way up north somewhere.

Part II:

Bonus audio cd:
(from the soundtrack of 'The Misanthrope')
1. Battlehorns
2. The Bastard Son
3. Lake Of Sorrow
4. Stay Away
5. Necroposers
6. The Will To Deny
7. The Solution

Both tracks 'Battlehorns' and 'Bastard Son' are unsettling post
apocalyptic black ambient music which work beautifully within
the film. However, listening to the audio cd (by itself) in solitude
catapulted me out into the void..like looking down at the earth
from the inside a space vehicle (some sort of one man escape
pod at the end of WWIII). No life remains, crackling of the last
burning embers smoking under the tanks and other futuristic war
machines. The once blue planet appears burnt orange and the
seas have turned a sickly shade of green. Then comes the post
nuclear freeze, smothering the orb in thick black clouds which
extinguish all life. The eerie electronic/synth creaking of a metal
encapsulation in the vacuum of space hurtling towards chaos is
somehow comforting in an odd way. At this point it seems that
this experimentation of Nocturno's would also work well as a
sci-fi or psi-fi soundtrack, even though that was not the intention.
'Lake Of Sorrow' brings to mind the empty "lake" basins on the
moon, a great place to go when they all won't seem to 'Stay Away'.
The abovementioned tracks are sort of like (for lack of a
better way to describe it) black space ambient with some late 60's
and 70's prog elements. 'Necroposers' sounds like a private joke:
black metallists doing a parody of  "Satanic" stoners engaging in
some rather serious deep inhalation.
All that being said, it's quite humorous and makes
me even more curious about what Darkthrone's upcoming Sept.
release 'F.O.A.D.' has in store. In addition to the Darkthrone
diehards, this cd will very likely draw in some of the seasoned
listeners of Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Hawkwind, Emerson, Lake
& Palmer, Tangerine Dream, Amon Düül II, Kraftwerk, etc.
as well as the younger progrock and stonerrock crowd.

film trailer: http://www.peaceville.com/themisanthrope
tyrant syndicate productions: http://www.tyrantsyndicate.com