Mona Mur in Conversation

The film

Mona Mur was born in Hamburg and became a leading figure in the German underground scene of the early 1980s. Her career has traversed many musical territories, from post-punk/industrial to electronica, from piano-based punk ballads to hard, experimental guitar music, all with her own signature style. She has collaborated with En Esch (KMFDM), FM Einheit, Mark Chung, Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten), Nikko Weidemann, Dieter Meier (Yello), J.J. Burnel and Dave Greenfield (Stranglers), Ralf Goldkind, filmmakers Monika Treut, Elfi Mikesch, Fatih Akin, photographer Ilse Ruppert, as well as the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Mona Mur is also a composer and sound artist for films and computer games. The re-release of her early albums provides a good opportunity to revisit her previous oeuvre. Mona Mur answers questions from filmmaker Dietmar Post in a bare studio with a screen showing photos, film and music video excerpts from throughout her career, resulting in a rich portrait of a musician who has followed her own vision and overcome resistance.

The filmmakers

Post and Palacios began making films in New York’s underground scene of the mid 90s with short fiction films that have been shown worldwide, including at Rotterdam Film Festival and many new underground festivals. They also made their first documentaries in the USA, including Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping and Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback. Both films were promoted by the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Albert Maysles, the pioneer of Direct Cinema, said of Reverend Billy: ‘Which TV station would be brave enough to show this film?’ The jury for the Grimme Award, the German TV Oscar, wrote of Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback: ‘It is not just the small, obscure things that make the film great. Not only the cult capital, the cool details about a footnote in pop history, but instead their talent for taking the story of five G.I.s stranded in Germany and their brief excursion into the bottom of the charts and turning it into a parable about the liberating energy of an era.(...) Post and Palacios have made them resonate again. Unlike the Monks’ fabulous utopian noise, the documentary is full of nuances.’

Richard Kostelanetz, an expert on John Cage, compared the film to Eberhard Fechner’s film about the Comedian Harmonists, which tells the history of the band from six different perspectives. Fechner himself chose the subtitle ‘Six Lives’.

In the above mentioned early films by Palacios and Post they combined the idea of ‘active recollection’ with a multi-perspective narrative form. Two other films demonstrate their interesting way of encouraging subjects to engage with archive material and statements by others. The ‘virtual jukebox’ was used as a stylistic device in their music documentary German Pop & Circumstance, which was nominated for a Grimme Award in 2016. Christian Bartels wrote in EPD Medien: ‘It not only tells the story of recent German history through pop, but develops current lines of discourse. Its discursive openness and clear line of argument is remarkable on television, where programmes like to answer questions and avoid those they can’t answer. It is a very layered film, created from broad research, which presents clear arguments, shows developments and asks intelligent questions. It gives few answers, which increases its effect. Anyone who’s watched it, will be talking about it for a long time.’

In the historical film Franco on Trial: The Spanish Nuremberg?, which took eight years to make and was released in 2018, the filmmakers again used inserts to discuss files, documents and archives directly with individuals. This generated discussion and contradictions, as well as a kaleidoscope of different perspectives on history. The literary scholar Manuel P. Muñoz compares their work with those of the Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes, whose novels often depict history from several perspectives.

With Mona Mur in Conversation, Post and Palacios return to their underground roots by making the film entirely alone, without film funding or a TV channel. The film has been supported by Unerhört Music Documentary Film Festival (Hamburg), Soundwatch Music Documentary Film Festival (Berlin) and Schwules Museum (Berlin) and the various artists who made it possible to use photos, videos and archive material.