A no-budget Berlin shock film whose real claim on the archive is its soundtrack: a genuine piece of organic-industrial practice, filed under industrial by the people who reissue it.
Nekromantik is the rare film the Bureau files chiefly for its music. Jörg Buttgereit shot it in West Berlin in 1987 on next to no money, using amateur technique deliberately, and it became an international cult object and a banned one. The taboo content is documented in many other places; the archive notes its nature, declines to itemise it, and turns to the soundtrack, which is where the genuine interest lies.
That score, by Hermann Kopp, Bernd Daktari Lorenz and John Boy Walton, is a real work of late-1980s German practice. Kopp's contributions in particular, built from viola, a rhythm box and seasick tape looping, amount to what one writer called an organic industrialism, sitting between twisted Switched-On-Bach electronics and oddly tender piano. It was never incidental music. Reissue labels have pressed it as a standalone record and dealers shelve it, without irony, under industrial and dark ambient, which is the company it keeps.
The film's ties run into the city's music underground as well. Buttgereit's milieu overlapped the scene, and the 1991 sequel features Mark Reeder, a long-standing figure in West Berlin music. As an object the film sits naturally beside Begotten in the archive's film list, a visual analogue to the death-industrial sensibility rather than a horror entry as such.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene