Black metal documentary misses out on music

At the start of "Until the Light Takes Us," a documentary about the black metal scene in Norway, I wondered why the background music was a sort of pop electronica, rather than some Norwegian black metal. As the 93-minute digital film unreeled itself, I began to see why.

Based on the film -- which screens Friday, Jan. 22 and Saturday, Jan. 23 (at 9 and 11 p.m.) at The Times Cinema -- music seems to have been peripheral in a scene that was more interested in rebellion, murder, suicide and the burning of churches. Whether or not the film is accurate about that is hard to say without a much deeper knowledge of a scene that was well out of the mainstream even among American metal fans.

The metal scene appears to have come to life in the 1980s in Norway with bands like the internationally known Venom and Celtic Frost, among others.

By the following decade, however, new bands like Burzum, Darkthrone and Mayhem -- all discussed in "Until the Light Takes Us" -- further honed the grinding metal sound into what became known as black metal.

Later, other bands picked up on the genre, watering it down and ruining it, according to Darkthrone drummer Gylve "Fenriz" Nagell. "It's out of our hands," he laments.

Nagell is one of the two main "characters" in "Until the Light Takes Us." The other is Burzum and Mayhem singer Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes, who is interviewed in a Norwegian maximum security prison. We don't find out until later in the film that he's serving 21 years for having murdered a fellow dark metal scene figure by stabbing him in the head.

Nagell says that while Vikernes went more into "politics," he himself focused more on black metal music.

Vikernes and Nagell help viewers reconstruct a bit of what the scene was like, but the filmmakers -- Americans Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell -- assume we know a fair bit about the movement. In this viewer's case, and I suspect many others, that's a poor assumption to make.

Aites and Ewell, who are fans of the music, spent two years in Norway making the picture.

Early on there is a discussion of the bands, a bit of footage from gigs and rehearsals and we hear some of the music. But music turns out to be a bit player in a story that is really about a group of young people (most in their early 20s, it seems) who resent how Christianity disrespected Norway's pre-Christian culture (and the international fast food takeover of Norway, too). But while for some this was the focus, others are harder to peg based on what the film tells us.

It's certainly not history or globalization that leads one band's guitarist to run for a camera rather than a telephone when he finds his lead singer dead, having blown apart his head with a shotgun. Nor to put the resulting gory photo on an album cover.

Those things also aren't likely behind the work of the dark metal drummer-turned-performance artist who travels to Italy to commit a gory mock public suicide in a Milan art space.

And, while Aites and Ewell allow Vikernes and others to explain the reasoning behind, and motivation for, their actions, they never put it into context. Was there a similar movement in Norway before black metal? Was the scene coopted by outsiders with an agenda? Did the movement simply spring up spontaneously and organically, completely outside any societal context?

Although we're promised a "poignant" story about a "misunderstood" movement, "Until the Light Takes Us" leaves the impression that the movement was violent, radical, hateful and murderous. Therefore, if the film is accurate, it seems to suggest instead that the movement is, in fact, quite well understood and anything but poignant.