Raw Materials

The band Laibach emerged in the 1980s in Slovenia, then part of communist Yugoslavia which was partly under the influence of the USSR, making Laibach in a sense the first geopolitical rockers in history. Since the early ‘80s, the band creates music with military aesthetics that made the statements of an already deceased punk movement sound like teenage lullabies. In this documentary about their early years, a wealth of images of Slovenian landscapes and cities burdened with heavy industry are interspersed with conversations with Slovenian intellectuals, philosophers, workers, citizens… as well as interviews and public statements by the band members and of course video clips and music by Laibach.

In this Super 8 film converted to 16 mm, form and background are caught in a continuous and vibrant interplay, accentuating the grain of the texture en playing with superposition, transforming every shadow and every ray of light into a tangible object.
Until he died of AIDS in 1994, Derek Jarman remained personally and artistically very close to the band Throbbing Gristle, whose members adorned this film with a long soundtrack - improvised as per their usual modus operandi. The combination of sound and image gives this production a strange and magical aura, which we project in Nova in its original format.