Ist FAUST Schön? – A Faust Documentary

It was epic, it was brilliant, it had attitude enough to raze cities and it ruined every show I went to for at least two years after.

– Julian Cope in Krautrocksampler

Writing in 1995, Cope reminisces about his first, and possibly only, encounter with the mind-bending organized chaos of early Faust performances. The year was 1973 and the band was touring the UK in support of their seminal The Faust Tapes. 37 years later, Faust remains – despite an official break-up in 1975 and a now reduced post-reunion line-up – a dominant force in today’s modern music landscape.

Much has already been written about Faust’s anarchic as well as disorienting recordings and stage performances although most of it concerns the first incarnation of the band. Stephen Thrower, in Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy, notes that on early recordings the band “sounds intensely, joyfully alive, reveling in sheer unrestricted creativity.” After reforming in 1990, Faust went through a series of personnel changes but the band managed to maintain its integrity and clarity of vision. Faust, in this new millennium, remains firmly committed to exploring the creative potential of collective experiments. It seems that not much has changed – “le chemin est le bon” insist band members Jean-Hervé Péron et Werner “Zappi” Diermaier.

It is this stubbornly uncompromising approach to music-making that Julien Perrin documents in Ist Faust Schön?. Perrin’s independently produced documentary film follows Péron, Zappi and Amaury Cambuzat (one of many incarnations of Faust) on their 2006 European tour. Ist Faust Schön? is not a history of Faust but it is a privileged look into the complex – and at times fragmented – creative process of three artists.

Perrin, in this film, is not concerned with unearthing ghosts from a distant past. Ist Faust Schön? does document a few attempts to revisit old sites and relationships but those efforts are for the most part aborted. What we are left with are fragments and debris that add texture to the film’s colorful collage of interviews and live performances. It might be an exaggeration to say that the film mirrors the cut-up and reckless collage approach championed by the band in its early days. But there is no doubt that Ist Faust Schön? avoids the many pitfalls associated with conventional documentary narratives. Perrin collects pieces here and there – like one collects field recordings – and offers an open framework that invites viewers to participate in the piecing together of disjointed elements.

The opening sequence of the film shows Zappi and Péron on stage destroying everything around them while Cambuzat remains on guitar providing a soundtrack for the reigning chaos. This destruction, just like Péron’s attack on a television set at the end of the film, serves as an enticement to stay lucid and engaged with reality. At mid-point in the film, Zappi calmly remarks, “we cannot make a mistake, an error or failure, or maybe it is all an error, but the way is always the right one.”

Le chemin est le bon.

Ist Faust Schön?, therefore, is not so much a film about Faust as it is a map that traces and sheds some light on the path forged by a group of eccentric visionary artists whose destination has not yet been fixed. Perrin’s film should be released on DVD in the near future but in the meantime we are left on our own to find our way through the noise and free form chaos of Faust 2010.

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