Life in Loops (A Megacities RMX)

The remix has become a celebrated fixture in music but surprisingly it has been little-explored in cinema. Austrian multimedia artist Timo Novotny (himself a musician/VJ with post-rockers Sofa Surfers) takes Michael Glawogger’s city film Megacities (1997) and, interweaving his own filmed footage and a music score, creates something entirely unique. Taking the raw material from the original film, Novotny shot additional material in Tokyo with Megacities DOP Wolfgang Thaler. Where Glawogger’s mesmerising essay film originally uncovered hidden aspects of some of the world’s metropolises (the Bombay dye maker, the workers in a New York sweatshop, the seedy spectacle of a Mexico City sex show) this experimental music documentary, which carried off the Best Feature Documentary prize at Karlovy Vary last year, offers an enlivening new cinematic experience. It invites debate and discussion about the aesthetic possibilities of documentary as well as the dialectical interaction between image and music.