LAIBACH
The Slovene art-rock provocateurs play songs from The Sound Of Music in their North Korean tour documentary Liberation Day.
“LAIBACH MAYBE SHOW THEIR HUMAN FACES, BUT DON’T TRUST THEM.”
Abba: The Movie. Charlie Is My Darling. The Kursaal Flyers showing the flies on the wall in BBC doc So You Wanna Be A Rock’N’Roll Star? Films of groups on tour have a hold on the music-minded cineaste, but none are like Liberation Day. On general cinema and DVD release later in 2017, it presents geopolitik agitators Laibach as the first western group to play live in the totalitarian pariah state of North Korea. Their concert programme? Laibachised versions of songs from The Sound Of Music. “Normally we don’t like tour concert films very much,” says Laibach spokesman Ivan Novak, speaking after the film’s international premiere in Amsterdam in November. “But obviously it is a special cultural event, doing the show in North Korea. So we were prepared to do it.” The visit, filmed in August 2015 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of North Korea’s independence from Japan, was made possible by Norwegian director, artist and North Korean cultural exchange specialist Morten Traavik. “Plenty of people just talk, but we saw that he actually does things,” says Novak. “It was a long debate, with lots of persuasions and diplomacy. He warned us straight away.” The resulting document is a humorous, disturbing, illuminating and sometimes moving immersion into an anomalous communist mirror-world, one wholly uncomprehending of rock’n’roll, let alone the multilevelled conceptual probings of Laibach. Though Novak avers, “the whole of North Korea is a Laibach country,” the trip is unsurprisingly tense: at a welcoming dinner, an official calls them “terrible… this band jokes about what they call dictatorships” before stressing the importance of trust. When they succeed in playing live, the (all-invited) crowd’s responses show bafflement, amusement and, for one man, what looks like something stirring deep inside. Throughout, human stories are foregrounded, but Novak says they are neither condoning nor condemning the regime. “Of course not. It is such a popular country in terms of condemning it. [But] we are not apologists. We do our job. We did a concert in North Korea as we do a concert in London or America. When we go somewhere, we try to understand the situation. We are actually looking for similarities. Of course there is utopian communism which works on a certain level, not everywhere. But capitalism is utopian also, and it also does not work.” Though co-director Traavik often leads the action – Novak calls him “the glue” of the story – Laibach are seen as human individuals, rather than the stern automatons of legend. “I don’t think we actually revealed anything, really,” says Novak, who adds that Laibach also hope to play in Iran and Cuba. “Those who believe that we are like the
machines off Westworld, that’s a little bit naïve. And Laibach has so many multiple faces that it doesn’t really matter. As [philosopher Slavoj] Zizek says, they maybe show their human faces, but don’t trust them.” “We had to trust [the film-makers],” he says. “It’s not that we would do the same kind of film, we would probably do a different edit. But it’s a small price for the big adventure.”