Review: Speaking in Code: A Techno Documentary

I watch a lot of documentary's.  I especially love music documentaries, they are my guilty pleasure.  Learning about a band or a musical movement can expand your musical knowledge and give you a sense of what it was like to be a part of it.

Music documentaries usually follow a familiar route.  In the case of a band, it's usually the meteoric rise, followed by the inevitable descent into irrelevance and excess, and then the unexpected redemption.  In the case of a movement or a musical genre, it's more about pin-pointing crucial times and exposing unheralded heroes, all the while bringing the viewer into the musical world it's chronicling.

Speaking in Code falls in the latter category, or at least that was the initial intention of the film-maker.  In what is an extremely DIY effort, the film-maker must be praised for the lengths they went to get this film made.  More people should be picking up a camera and some credit cards and documenting some of our important movements.  The only problem with films with a budget like this, is that the film-maker is usually becomes a part of what appears on-screen, rather than directing the action, and that's what happened with this film.

What happened over the course of the production of this film, is that the film-maker (or more specifically her husband) started to become another subject of the film.  The doco is about Techno, and reaches out to some top flight names to help us understand it's patterns and ideals, but it's also about the film-maker and her husband, who find their relationship splintering due their different lives, even though both live their lives on the fringe of the Techno Community.

I found the film-maker being distracted from the original idea of what they wanted this film to be, because of the screen time invested in chronicling their fracturing relationship.  Techno (as with most musical genres) is wildly divergent, and moving back and forth between the lives of the Techno pioneers and aficionado's, to the troubles of the film-maker and her DJ/Promoter husband, diluted the impact of the source material left us with an inconclusive argument as to what the film was trying to do.

That said, the chance to get up close and personal with the likes of Modeselektor and members of the Kompakt and BPitch records labels (among others) is pretty intriguing.  We see the interior of the Kompakt label offices and hear CEO Wolfgang Voigt talk about their legacy and humble beginnings.  The Wighonomy Brothers bring the film-maker into their highly stressful and driven lives, and Modeselektor introduce us to their mums.


It's a great ride, with some awesome music, but I can understand how anybody with only a passing interest in techno could easily give up on this one.  The genre begs for a more thorough going over, from a film-maker with a bigger budget.  The film-maker here obviously loves the music and people in it, but from the viewer perspective, we needed something a little more objective and a little less personal.

I recommend this for any casual music fan and it's a must for any dance music lover.  I just wanted it to be something it could never be: definitive.

Bob Burt


Speaking in Code Trailer from sQuare productions on Vimeo.