20130902: Documentary Review--Electronic Awakening

Electronic Awakening

1. American live action feature length film, 2011, documentary, music, mystery, dance, spirituality, 90 minutes, NR.
2. IMDB: 8.9/10.0 from 28 users.  'Explores the transcendent experience and the evolving spirituality of electronic dance music culture.'
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No reviews yet,' and 0% of 2 audience ratings liked it.
4. Written and directed by Andrew Johner.  Filmed in a variety of countries at music festivals, but mostly on the US Pacific coast.


5. Many experts were interviewed. EDM is Electronic Dance Music.
6. Early on, there was an archival Jim Morrison interview from 1970.  Morrison foresees musical groups being smaller, and using computers and lots of electronics.  By the mid-1980s, the electronic synthesizer was present, and changes accelerated on the electronic music front. By 1993, the rave mixed EDM with the drug ecstasy, which the film often associates with the mental state, ecstasy.
7. However, the cultural backlash hit when problems with drugs (rave participants dying of drug overdoses, for instance) became more prevalent.  Also, death due to fires caused by illegal overcrowding caused a lot of consternation.
8. Underground warehouse raves became commercialized huge meetings; this led to smaller meetings in the desert or on isolated beaches.  Moontribe became a long-running community that met during full moons for a number of years.  Other 'tribes' spun off.
9. Through the drugs, music, and dancing, one sees some old processes re-emerge: hand-holding circles, dervish twirling, constructing altars from whatever is nearby, conch playing, 'ecstatic religious experience,' ganga-water sprinkling.
10. Dancing, singing, and drumming are all older than thinking, rationality, and conscious religion.  This is well-known.  It's interesting to see modern manufactured components (electronic music and high-tech drugs) shoe-horn these ancient anti-thinking modes back into modern life.  Clearly, current humans enjoy turning their minds off just as much as our forebears did.
11. The discussion of drums or electronic music helping promote theta wave activity was passing interesting.  Some EEG readouts were even recorded on film.  'Electronic music tends to have no lyrics.' This is no surprise; language involves thinking, and the effort here is to obliterate thinking, to dissolve oneself into the sound, to get those theta waves going strong.  Theta waves are associated with the feeling of awe, and the experience of religious ecstasy.
12. This whole thing is the active promotion of addictive behaviors that allow one to get closer to stop thinking and break off with associations with the real world.
13. One argument in favor of electronic music was so telling.  An acoustic guitar, for instance, links one to the physical world via the wood, the strings, and your fingers interacting with physical matter to produce sound.  The electronic music allows for less touch, and more abstraction; one can push the world away further.
14. During one video clip of a tribe at a meeting, most of the people were holding up both arms with hands open.  It's the sign one makes when trying to encourage a home invasion robber not to rape and kill you.  It's also the sign one makes to surrender to a cop, to encourage the cop not to beat you up or kill you.  At that same meeting, upon a raised dais was a small group of shaman-like characters, who were receiving what they clearly thought to be adulation.
15. EarthDance is a group that uses modern communications to coordinate these events around the world.  These multi-events might have 100,000 people total, with each location having their own DJ, but the DJs are playing a synchronized list.
16. Radical self-expression sounds like Burning Man, but what does this film have to do with Burning Man?  Ah, there was often a rave camp near Burning Man, and the pounding bass and never-ending drumbeat colonized BM.
17. Going into the 2000s, the number of people attending these mass dance events has tripled, or so the film claims.
18. 'The art is becoming the new religion.'  Sure.  It's just as restrictive, just as cult-like, just as deeply opposed to freedom.
19. The 2012 Mayan miasma was embraced by many of these groups.  Since 2012 has come and gone, I'd like to see a 2013 (or later) mini-update.
20. The repetitions of the sentiments '...a completely integrated humanity...' and 'no boundaries between individuals' is the most hideous, hellish obscenity that I have ever heard of or read since Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, a seminal work for any movement that advocates the mass suicide of human culture.
21. The film cycles back to Jim Morrison for a few seconds toward the end.  Since Morrison committed suicide about a year after the interview, this is a nice touch.


22. One line summary: More propaganda than documentary.
23. One star of five.

Cinematography: 3/10 So-so at best.  Focus problems, graininess, over exposures, under exposures, flair, framing issues, camera jump, camera slide, awkward zooming, stupid misuse of fish-eye lenses, and so on.

Sound: 8/10 Better than the visuals, but some of the incidental music was overbearing.

Screenplay: 0/10 There is some coherence to the piece: advocacy of finding unity while dancing in a drug addled state out in the sticks with severely reduced sanitation and personal hygiene.  Permanent Woodstock.