Awesome; I F**kin' Shot That!

You might already have heard about the gimmick the Beastie Boys used to shoot their latest concert video. The influential three-man hip hop crew handed 50 cameras to 50 fans to cover a show at Madison Square Garden from every possible angle. It's a great idea, but here are two facts you might not be aware of: given the poor lighting conditions, the cheap DV used by the amateur cinematographers looks lousy on a movie screen, and the insane amount of footage generated led to some insanity in the editing room. Director Adam Yauch, aka Beastie Boy MCA (and credited as "Nathaniel Hornblower") tries out every single cheesy video effect and manages a density of montage that averages 70 cuts per minute. A more truthful title for the film would have been: "Aw, I shot that with a crappy webcam and MCA edited the hell out of it."

At the film museum at the new Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, there is an entire room dedicated to Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, a pair of movies that document the 1936 Olympic games. Most of the room is taken up with a model of the stadium, where little lights show the locations of the cameras, which Riefenstahl had placed in strategic positions. Intended as Nazi propaganda, Olympia was supposed to glorify the Führer through low angles, so a number of cameras were aimed at Hitler's balcony from below. Riefenstahl's biggest innovation, however, was the way the athletes were shot, against the sky and disconnected from the crowd. In glorious slow motion, beautiful bodies sail across the screen in a carefully choreographed ballet of sports.

I mention this because Riefenstahl's orderly, preplanned approach is the precise opposite of letting a bunch of drunken fans with cameras loose inside Madison Square Garden. As you might expect, the results are different, too. Riefenstahl's film makes us part of a uniform crowd that is always looking up, admiring the perfect bodies of Aryan heroes. The method of Awesome amounts to cubist filmmaking: like omnipresent gods, we are everywhere at once. Faces in the crowd flash by, and through Yauch's staccato editing, we can see the musicians from every angle simultaneously. Olympia is an expression of Riefenstahl's fascist leanings, and at its best, Awesome isn't just democratic but anarchic--the perfect vehicle for the Beastie Boys' boundless energy, the way they hop, rap, and tumble past each other in their hyperkinetic stage dance, trading lines and verses in a non-stop pumping aural assault.

The Beasties' sense of humor also filters down into the fan footage: one joker documents his trip to the bathroom, others use the camera to sneak backstage, and some guy in the rafters is working the crowd: "You're gonna be on the DVD, act real excited!" Too many concert films, enamored with the closeness to the performers, focus entirely on the musicians' fingers and faces. Awesome does a groundbreaking job at showing what a concert actually looks like from the audience.

But when it's all said and done, Awesome is still an exhausting experience--I recommend you bring eye drops, and perhaps aspirin. Because of the poor quality of the DV, most of the film looks pretty lousy, and after a while, the editing is enough to make you want to ch-ch-check your head. On top of the breakneck cutting, the image tends to be solarized, posterized, or otherwise tweaked with video effects not seen since mid-eighties Grateful Dead concerts. Beasties fans are going to go see Awesome no matter what the critics say, but everybody else might be better off appreciating the film's concept in the abstract rather than sitting through the retina-endangering, seizure-triggering and headache-inducing reality of it.