Last night I saw an excellent documentary on Heavy Metal music and it’s fans shot and prduced by a pair of passionate Canadian cinemetographer metalheads. ‘Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey‘ is an immediate cult classic, full of interviews, stunning live footage and profound intellectual interpretations. The SFiFF 49is showing itself to be as topic-diverse as I had toped.

Growing up I loved rock, particularly prog rock, but never got drawn into metal. I misunderstood that the ’satanism’ was more like halloween and the blood and swords were about individual strength, not hatred towards others. But my high school was so small that anyone that wan’t pure apple pie, hung out and dreamed about moving on to bigger and better things. So the dead heads (me), metalheads, punks (who I thouhgt I once was once was) tended to hang out in the same part of the parking lot. All the metalheads I knew were positive, friendly and confident. They were the first ones ready to get a job and simply get on with life. Their reputation as dirtbags and satan worshippers never made sense to me.

‘Metal’ goes a long way to reinforce what I used to doubt about the sterotype. Metalheads may not be the most intellectual crowd, but, unlike punks, or football players for that matter, they aren’t going to bash anyone who isn’t like them, they are just happy to have found their scene and could really not care about yours. The movie traces metal’s roots back to Wagner, then the protometal sound, before exploring the birth of Heavy Metal, it’s hey day and then exploring all it’s domiant variant such as Power, Speed, Glam, Death, Black etc. There’s a lot of metal I don’t like, but there was not one note int he movie that didn’t sound profound. There was not one interview that didn’t make me think and not one fan that didn’t make me happy knwoing that that metalhead was where they wanted to be.