Just announced: 'Les Rallizes Denudes' music film at MOCAD Aug. 19

Released on VHS in 1992, the film combines Mousike's assemblage of archival backstage and performance footage with a series of concerts. The obsessed director crossed the world to shoot the band, at his own expense, during the savage, black-leather-clad final days of Les Rallizes Denudes' 37-year existence. Mousike eschews a narrative arc the film lacks language of any sort, save for the fabricated French-Beatnik-Japanese creole leader Takeshi Mizutani "sang" in to avoid association with any of the societies he so seditiously despised in favor of an approach both concrete and formally impressionistic: his film is disconnected, opaque, displaced, harsh and jarring, much like the mysterious, dark entity on which he is so singularly focused. Never has a performance film worked so hard at summoning the abstract qualities of an artist's essence and mystique.