Favorites of the week: recommendations from the SZ editorial team – culture

Arte documentary “Exterminate the beasts!”

Dear reader, were you also born with white skin? Then congratulations on the “ultimate privilege”, as the renowned black documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck (“I am not your negro”) puts it. In his four-part documentary “Exterminate the Beasts!” the native Haitian explains in a drastic narrative how a “simple difference in pigment” became a “source of power”, a “characteristic of superiority”, “authority to abuse”. And how the worst violence and inhumanity resulted from this ideology of a divine or natural white supremacy, the enslavement and wanton annihilation of entire peoples. This is tough stuff. Because of its very personal approach, one should already see this exceptional documentary (in the Arte media library until May 31st) do not see before bedtime, nightmares are guaranteed. In general, it takes a lot out of you, makes you doubt humanity.

In his instructive filmic essay, Peck unrolls 600 years of colonialism, racism and genocide – not historically and chronologically, but rather erratically associatively, in the use of his means, such as an emotional soundtrack, often also strikingly, suggestively, manipulatively. However, it is always research- and fact-based, documented with blatant image and archive material. Starting with the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America, the founding bloody deed of the USA, to which he keeps returning, Peck jumps back and forth between centuries, countries and continents – like an authorial narrator sitting in front of a globe and pointing his finger here and there pointing there, creating enlightening cross-references, illuminating the big picture. He also brings in his own story and family album: “All in.” As a black filmmaker, neutrality is “not an option” for him.

The trip of horror goes back to the Crusades and leads via the so-called discovery of America to the devastating excesses of European expansion, the exploitation of Africa, the slave trade, 19th century colonialism and from there to the Holocaust. Peck does not relativize the mass murder of the Jews; he only elaborates that the Nazis did not invent racial hatred and genocide. The ideology was already in the world.

The brutal title “Exterminate the Beasts!” is a sentence from Joseph Conrad’s story “Heart of Darkness”, one of many quotes that Peck uses in his disturbing documentary. In addition to film clips, animated comics, clichés and pop culture snippets, there are also hand-made game scenes in which Hollywood actor Josh Hartnett has the arse card: he embodies the prototype of the murderous white man through the ages. Right at the beginning he shoots a woman from the Seminole tribe from ice cold. It is the starting shot for a first-class documentary. As narrator, Raoul Peck says: “I know this story is painful. But we still have to know it.” Necessarily! Christine Dossel

Gidon Kremer’s Vineyard

How does that Gidon Kremer? He strikes an open chord and the listeners are immediately captivated, touched, as it were transported to another sphere, yes, world. What sounds neutrally dry with others has a suggestive, transforming, challenging new and unheard-of effect with him. In pieces for solo violin in particular, Kremer’s art of transferring his inquiring creative imagination to the listener and thus the unfolding of the inner being of the music played can magically banish. Of course, this applies first to the live performance in the concert hall. But the new CD (ECM) with the three violin solo sonatas by Mieczysław Weinberg (1919 – 1996) communicates something essential about the soloist, despite the intended solitude of this music: Gidon Kremer never plays the violin all alone, but he fulfills this painful, sometimes Dull, overcast music that sometimes erupts into hysterical wildness as a creative risk-taking act of self-exploration. At least that’s the impression, because Kremer doesn’t present the pieces from the outside, but rather carefully and consistently gets to the heart of the matter. For the attentive listener, this becomes an exciting adventure.

Weinberg, who just managed to escape extermination by the Nazis from Warsaw via Belarus and then Uzbekistan until he got to Moscow with the active support of Dmitri Shostakovich and made a name for himself there as a composer, only found out years later that his whole family was killed by the Nazis. But even in Moscow he was not safe from anti-Semitic attacks and was even arrested. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 could he breathe a sigh of relief without being adequately recognized as a first-rate composer. This has only happened since the posthumous world premiere of his opera “The Passenger” at the Bregenz Festival in 2010. And also through the commitment of Kremer and others to Weinberg’s complex work. The 1st Sonata, written in 1964, has five movements like a tour de force through the extremes of the violin: wide spread chords, frantic running passages, pizzicato outbursts and giant leaps between low and high registers, in between short lurking rest phases. The 2nd sonata from 1967, on the other hand, forms a kind of mosaic of fragments of hesitation, trembling, of quiet scraps of melody, broken lines and fragments of it found again. The 3rd sonata from 1979, dedicated to Weinberg’s father, who was a theater musician, builds up without a break in the movement to a radically expressive emotional storm, which in the end dies out in pizzicato and vanishing pianissimo particles. Gidon Kremer, who recorded the 3rd Sonata in 2013 and the other two in 2019, visualizes these three meditative excursions into solitude so uncompromisingly that no one can resist. Harold Eggebrecht

Pop: Everything will be fine

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Now also have the warm sound of strumming the electropoppers from metronomy discovered. For more than 15 years, band founder Joseph Mount had recorded tracks with changing line-ups that bounced out of the speakers like ping-pong balls. Now, on album number seven, the Brits roll out a sonic flokati carpet over the dance floor: “Things will be fine” is the name of the previously available song on the record “Small World”. In times of this never-ending pandemic, here comes an assurance that it will be over eventually, for sure. For all those who find it difficult to look ahead optimistically, Metronomy have recorded a video in which looking backwards is warming: iMacs, clamshell phones and old game consoles are bringing back the times when everything was fine anyway. Moritz Baumsteiger

Audio play: Echo’s Chambers

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The director Leonhard Koppelmann turns the one main character into three: Sophonisbe splits in his radio play version of the novel “Echo Chambers” (SWR 2, Sunday, 6:20 p.m.) by Iris Hanika in Sophie, Phonie and Nisbe. Stephanie Eidt, Valery Tscheplanowa and Kathrin Angerer play these triune women. The novel, which received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize last year, is a complicated matter. Sophonisbe doesn’t want to run the risk of living the right life in the wrong one. But what is real about New York and Berlin, where she lives one after the other, and what about literary overwriting? What is real about her relationship with men and what is projection? Koppelmann condenses this basic conflict into a hundred-minute search for the right point of view. Stephen Fisher

Tactful: “Tune” in the Haus der Kunst

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The sound is the constant. “Tune” has been blowing through the Haus der Kunst since last summer: a loose sequence of “sound residencies” such as concerts, performances, artist appearances and, also, installations. “A Call to Disorder”, the work that Lamin Fofana installed at the start in the cold, bright terrace room, was the only one that survived. Jo Penca then set up a room in the west wing. This weekend’s guest is Beatrice Dillon, a Londoner whose latest album combines Afro-Caribbean rhythms with the writings of British colour-field painter Bridget Riley. On Saturday, after an artist talk, she will present her performance “Impossible Angle” together with Eve Stainton, and her installation will also be on view for only three days. The series ends in March with performances by Abdullah Miniawy and Justin Urbach. For the monumental Haus der Kunst, the encounter format of “Tune” is a novelty that pulses through an extraordinary time with its own rhythm. Catherine Lorch