Obviously you find many posts, videos and music honoring the great Michael Jackson these days. I got particularly interested when I saw that non other then Spike Lee directed a documentary on MJ called “Bad 25”. As the title suggests, it’s a film about the making of the album “Bad” – the stories behind the songs, the videos, the tour. Most of the time “Bad 25” is what I would call a classic fan-movie. You got interviews with people like Questlove, Cee-Lo Green, Kanye West or producers and video-directors who have worked with the King Of Pop and they all remind us about how great MJ was. Which is perfectly all right, since he was one of the greatest after all. But doing a fan-movie is not the most sophisticated kind of filmmaking I guess.

“Bad 25” got some very interesting parts though. Especially when it comes to the shooting of music-videos, Spike Lee seems to be very interested in his colleagues work and the film unravels some exiting details about the creative stories behind the “short-films” (as MJ called them) of “Bad”, “Dirty Diana” or “Liberian Girl”. It becomes clear that MJ was a fanatic worker, supervising every detail of props, costume design and choreography. This obsession for details also came down the studio-sessions with Quincy Jones and other musicians, as his former sound-technicians tell us in the film.

You can see “Bad 25” for three more days in the Arte-Mediathek. If you’re a fan of MJ (and I mean, who isn’t?) it’s definitely worth checking out!

www.arte.tv/guide/de/049868-000/bad-25

During research for a film project I came across the documentary “Kvadrat” by Anatoly K. Ivanov. The film follows Russian DJ Andrey Pushkarev to gigs in Russia, Romania, Switzerland, France and Hungary. The tagline of the film is: “A documentary about the realities of techno-DJing”, which seem to be rather sad. We often see Pushkarev travelling by himself or spending time alone in his hotel room. But even when he is DJing in clubs, Pushkarev seems to be an outsider. Anatoly Ivanov – who also photographed the film – finds powerful images to illustrate Pushkarev isolation at the parties, showing the DJ completely focused and lost in his work while the crowd around him is getting completely crazy. I liked the aesthetic approach of the film: very few dialogue, no talking heads, but a vigorous soundtrack selected and mixed by Pushkarev himself.

The visual style and especially the editing of the film very much distinguishes from the tons of Resident Advisor and Slices features that are flooding the internet nowadays, which basically all look the same and most of the time show serious lacks in storytelling. In contrast to this, “Kvadrat” is a character-driven film, which successfully captures the ambiguity of the techno- and club-world, the magic of the music as well as the disillusioning moments once the party is over.

Anatoly Ivanov uploaded the film on Vimeo where you can watch it for free: